TechTIDE External Expert Advisory Board
The EEAB brings together influential international scientists, service developers and users, as well as representatives from international organizations who are active on space situational awareness programmes, with interests relevant to the project, but who are independent of it. It will ensure that the project is engaged with and responsive to developments in Europe and non-EU countries and that the project achieves its intended impacts.
TechTIDE EEAB members
| Name | Country | Affiliation | Expertise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elisabeth Blanc | France | The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) | Research Director at CEA Earth environment from ground up to the ionosphere; Coordinator of the ARISE FP7 and H2020 projects |
| Ernest Bosch Llopart | Spain | Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya | N-RTK operations |
| Bodo Reinisch | USA | Lowell Digisondes International | Ionospheric experiments, incl. software and hardware development |
| Ben Witvliet | The Netherlands and United Kingdom | Telecommunication Engineering University of Twente and Centre for Space, Atmospheric and Oceanic Science of the University of Bath, United Kingdom. | Ionospheric propagation channel perturbations, propagation, delay, Doppler spread, delay spread, scattering, radio fade-out. |
Ernest Bosch Llopart is head of the Geodetic Area at the Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya. With Telecommunications Engineering MSc. background, he has developed his career involved in Geodesy projects at ICGC for 20 years. Starting with the design, deployment, and operation of GNSS CORS stations and service provisioning. Since 2005, he is Geodetic Unit manager, working on high precision static and kinematic positioning, GNSS/INS integration solutions, airborne and terrestrial, Geodetic Reference Frames modernization and operating CATNET GNSS network and NRTK services in Catalonia since 2006. He has conducted for 10 years consultancies in the previous fields to several local government agencies, and internationally in Asia and the Middle East. Since 2012, Manages the Airborne Operations department integrated in the Geodetic Area, responsible to capture data from image/NIR, LIDAR and hyperspectral sensors with ICGC airborne fleet.
Βodo Reinisch emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, is the President and CEO of Lowell Digisonde International, LLC since 2009. He has been in charge of the development of the “Digisonde” ionospheric sounder and the Global Ionosphere Radio Observatory (GIRO). He was the PI for the development of the highly successful Radio Plasma Imager (RPI) instrument on NASA’s IMAGE mission, and the institutional PI for the development of a magnetospheric sounder instrument for the AF’s DSX mission. He also was the PI for the development of the Double-Probe & Topside Ionosphere Sounder (DPTIS) prototype system delivered to the Air Force Research Laboratory in 2016. His work is documented in more than 300 publications in peer reviewed journals and books. In 2011 he received the International Union of Radio Science ‘URSI Appleton Price’ with the citation “For revolutionizing radio sounding from ground and space with development of the Digisonde and the IMAGE/RPI instrument, both data providers for space weather monitoring and ionospheric modeling”. In 2014 he was awarded the ‘International Kristian Birkeland Medal for Space Weather and Space Climate’ in Liège, Belgium for “Outstanding Scientific Results in the field of Space Weather”.
As a cofounder and president of the German International School Boston, Massachusetts, he was instrumental in expanding international education, and in 2012 he was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse by the President of Germany.
Ben A. Witvliet was born in Biak, Netherlands New Guinea in 1961. He received his BSc in Electrical Engineering in Enschede, The Netherlands. He worked at the HF broadcasting station of Trans World Radio in Monaco and in electronic engineering at several companies in The Netherlands and Israel. He was as Chief Engineer of the HF broadcast radio station of Radio Netherlands in Antananarivo, Madagascar. He was manager of the transmitter and antenna specialists of the Netherlands Broadcast Transmitter Company. Since 1997 he worked for Radiocommunications Agency Netherlands as Principal Investigator in applied research and as Technical Advisor. He participates in ITU Study Group 3 on radio wave propagation. In 2015 he obtained his PhD at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, by part-time research on Near Vertical Incidence Skywave antennas and propagation, for which received the Anton Veder scientific research award and prize. He was Guest Editor of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine Special Issue on HF Radio Systems and Techniques. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE since 2011. He is a regular reviewer for several journals. Currently he works as Research Manager (Radio Science) at the Centre for Space, Atmospheric and Oceanic Science of the University of Bath, United Kingdom. Research interest are antennas, ionospheric radio wave propagation, ionospheric radio channel characterization, HF radio noise, and VHF/UHF propagation measurements.