2001 PSGC Graduate Fellow
Former PhD student at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, Paul Tompkins, received the PSGC Graduate Fellowship for his research focused on enabling planetary rovers to autonomously select long-range paths considering mission objectives, available resources, operational constraints and uncertainty. “Winning a Space Grant fellowship gave my education a boost and aided (through funds and prestige) in winning larger fellowships (GSRP) that were instrumental to my PhD research and career (with involvement at NASA Ames Research Center),” Paul stated. Paul was the Lead Flight Director for the NASA Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), managed and operated from NASA Ames Research Center. The LCROSS mission culminated in the discovery of water at the lunar South Pole, announced in November, 2009. He is now a senior mission operations engineer at Space Exploration Technologies working on the development, training, and execution of flight operations for the Dragon spacecraft.
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