Gladys West
Gladys West was born on October 27, 1930. In 202,1, she received the NCWIT Pioneer in Tech Award. She also earned a free scholarship to Virginia State College (now University). Dr. West played a major part in developing the Global Positioning System (GPS). She was admired by her colleagues for her skill in calculating complex mathematical equations, she excelled in programming for computers. She rose through the ranks at NSWCDD and worked on satellite geodesy and other satellite measurements that contributed to the accuracy of GPS. Almost everyone is impacted by her work on the GPS. She later became project manager for the radar altimetry data processing project of Seasat, the first satellite designed for the imaging of the Earth’s oceans, for which she received a commendation. One of her first major projects was work on the Naval Ordinance Research Calculator (NORC), a program designed to determine the movements of Pluto in relation to Neptune. Her minor accomplishments include being hired as a mathematician by the U.S. Naval Proving Ground, a weapons laboratory in Dahlgren, Virginia, as only their fourth Black employee, and working and achieving her mastors degree in Virgina, which was extremely hard to get at the time due to racial issues.
