Gladys West

Academic Accomplishments: Gladys West graduated high school as the valedictorian, and she got a full scholarship to Virginia State University. She graduated in 1952 with a Bachelor of Science and Mathematics Degree in Math, and she once again went to the same college and got a masters degree in 1955. She earned another master's degree in public administration in 1973 from the University of Oklahoma; got a PhD in public administration and policy affairs from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 2000.

Computer Science Accomplishments: Her major contributions were that she was a project manager on the Seasat radar altimetry project in the early 1960s, which was to make a satellite that could remotely observe oceans. In the 1970s, she programmed the “IBM 7030 Stretch” computer to make it more optimized to calculate the shape of the Earth because the earth was an ellipsoid, so there were gravitational fluctuations that she had to take into account in her calculations. Then she wrote a technical report on how to improve the accuracy of geoid heights and vertical deflection in recording Earth’s properties by using data from the Geosat satellite. All of this contributed to the accurate measurements of GPS and satellite data.