Flying home, with all the latest technologies
Honoring the relationships that started at Ohio University
This feature appears in the fall/winter issue of Ohio Today as part of "The Common Thread," a series celebrating relationships that had Ohio University as their starting point. In the coming days, we’ll continue to share vignettes from this collection.
By Stephen McKean
With 50,000 takeoffs and landings every day in the United States
alone, the skies are getting a bit crowded up there.
To maintain efficiency -- and more importantly, safety -- newer and better satellite technologies are in ever-increasing demand.
And when Tim Murphy, MSEE '84, a technical fellow at Boeing Aircraft, is in need of aviation electronics research, he knows exactly where to look: his alma mater.
Murphy, a product of Ohio University's Avionics Engineering Center, is one of the world's foremost experts on avionics, which
is, broadly defined, the study of navigation systems for aircraft. Because of its respected reputation and his own experiences there, Murphy has contracted the center to build and test prototypes of various satellite technologies for Boeing since 1996.
The relationship has proven to be mutually beneficial, with Boeing receiving top-quality research in the field, and Ohio researchers, faculty and students getting the opportunity to work on practical, real-world satellite applications.
The university also has sent several students to Boeing over the years to work as interns at the company's Seattle headquarters. "They always do good work," says Murphy.
Currently, the center is helping to develop monitoring stations for the collection of data on the satellite constellation. Ohio University
senior research engineer Trent Skidmore, a friend as well as a colleague of Murphy's on various industry standards groups, says the center's long history makes partnerships with companies such as Boeing possible.
Considering that over the past decades, the center has "worked on all of the major navigation systems that the world has used to get airplanes from point A to point B," Skidmore thinks the relationship with Boeing will be ongoing.
Murphy thinks so, too, and he plans to continue his work with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science's Board of Advisors, on which he's served since 2005.
"I'm very interested in things like where the curriculum is going and how they're preparing students for the realities of working
in engineering today," he says.
Stephen McKean, BA '98, is a writer based in Athens.
Return to the main page of "The Common Thead" series.
Posted 11-02-2007
|
