E. Glenn Lightsey is the John W. Young Endowed Chair Professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. Since 2023, he also serves as the chair of the steering committee for Georgia Tech’s Interdisciplinary Space Research Initiative. From 2019 to 2023, he was the director of the Center for Space Technology And Research and the director of the Space Systems Design Lab at Georgia Tech. 

His research program focuses on the technology of small satellites, including: guidance, navigation, and control systems; attitude determination and control; formation flying, satellite swarms, and satellite networks; cooperative control; proximity operations and autonomous spacecraft rendezvous; space-based global navigation systems; radionavigation; propulsion; satellite operations; and space systems engineering. Lightsey founded two companies which invented and commercialized space technology, one of which was acquired. 

Lightsey has co-authored more than 200 technical publications and four book chapters. He is an AIAA Fellow. He is Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Small Satellites. Lightsey has received the AIAA’s Mechanics and Control of Flight Award, the John Leland Atwood Award, and the Institute of Navigation’s Tycho Brahe Award. Prior to joining the faculty at the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, Lightsey held the position of Fellow of the W. R. Woolrich Professor in Engineering in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin. He held the title of University Distinguished Teaching Professor, a position designated to less than 5% of the tenured faculty at The University of Texas System. Lightsey received the William David Blunk Memorial Professorship for outstanding undergraduate teaching at the University of Texas at Austin. From 1986 to 1999, he was a spacecraft guidance and control engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Glenn Lightsey CV