Terry Moore wins international navigation award from IAIN

Terry Moore is the first British academic to take home the John Harrison Award for outstanding contributions to navigation.

Terry Moore

Terry Moore, a positioning and navigation expert at the University of Nottingham and longtime GPS World Editorial Advisory Board member and author, has become the first British academic to win a prestigious international award in the field.

Terry Moore is an Emeritus Professor and former director of the Nottingham Geospatial Institute at the University’s Faculty of Engineering.

The International Association of Institutes of Navigation (IAIN) awarded Moore with its John Harrison Award for outstanding contributions to navigation. The award ceremony took place during a special session of the Navigation 2021 Conference in Edinburgh, which took place Nov. 16-18.

HRH The Princess Royal (Princess Anne) attended via Zoom to present the award, and had a one-to-one conversation with Professor Moore.

The John Harrison award is a premier global award in the navigation field and Professor Moore is its first British winner.

“It’s a great honor to be recognized by the global navigation community, and I feel quite humbled,” Moore said. “John Harrison was a simple country carpenter in the 18th century who solved the major problem of measuring longitude at sea, through his remarkable marine chronometers. Despite his genius, he struggled for acceptance by the scientific establishment, and it took many years until he received the recognition (and financial reward) he deserved. It is sad that over 200 years later we are still fighting for improved equality, diversity and inclusion throughout scientific disciplines. I am absolutely delighted to receive the award in his name.”

A professor of satellite navigation for 20 years at the university, Moore’s association with Nottingham goes back to his undergraduate degree starting in 1979. During his distinguished career, all of it spent at Nottingham, he has taken a leading role in national and European initiatives aimed at integrating academic research and teaching activities in GNSS. He has also interacted closely with industry throughout that time.

He was the founding director of GRACE — the GNSS Research and Applications Centre of Excellence — which was jointly funded by the University and the East Midlands Development Agency and has now been extended to cover all geospatial applications as the Geospatial Research and Applications Centre of Excellence.

Moore has overseen numerous research projects funded by industry, research councils, the European Space Agency and the European Commission, and has supervised almost 40 successful PhD students.

He is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow and the Immediate Past President of the Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN) and also a Fellow and a Member of Council of the Institute of Navigation (ION) in the United States. He was recently elected as the Chair of the European Group of Institutes of Navigation (EUGIN), and is an Honorary Member of IAIN. In 2013 he was awarded the RIN Harold Spencer-Jones Gold Medal. He received RIN’s J E D Williams Medal and the ION Johannes Kepler Award, both in 2017.

Professor Moore is a member of the U.S. National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) Advisory Board and is a Member of the European Space Agency (ESA) GNSS Science Advisory Committee. He was an expert contributing to the UK Government Blackett Review on GNSS Vulnerability and has worked extensively on the UK’s PNT Strategy.

He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and an Associate Fellow of the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society, and is a Member of the Editorial Advisory Council of The Journal of Navigation.

“Many congratulations to Terry on this outstanding achievement,” said Stuart Marsh, director of the NGI. “It is fantastic to see our former director, who has spent so many years of his career in our faculty, serving in many different capacities, receive such a high honor.”