Professor Emeritus Byron Tapley was selected to receive the 2020 John Leland Atwood award presented jointly by the American Society of Engineering Education Aerospace Division and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Established in 1985, the award is given annually to honor an outstanding educator in the field of aerospace engineering.
Tapley has a rich history of teaching and research activities in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics (ASE/EM) at UT Austin spanning the past 60 years, where he developed a world-renowned space academic program. He has interacted with thousands of students and supervised hundreds more since joining the faculty in 1960. From 1966 – 1977, Tapley served as the ASE/EM Department chair, and in collaboration with NASA in 1981, he established UT Austin’s Center for Space Research (CSR) to conduct research in orbit determination and navigation, space geodesy, exploration of the solar system and the scientific applications of space systems data to studying the Earth System Interactions. Tapley served as the director of CSR for 46 years.
