Following 28 years of involvement with the International Telemetering Conference (ITC) and its sponsoring organization, the International Foundation for Telemetering (IFT), Professor Michael Rice received the Pioneer Award for his contributions to the telemetering field. He received the award at the annual International Telemetering Conference in Las Vegas on October 22, 2019.
The Pioneer Award is given to individuals at the forefront of the telemetry field. According to the IFT, “[winners] have demonstrated continual leadership and innovation in moving our highly technical field forward at high speed.” One individual per conference can receive the award, but the award is not given at every conference.
Over the years, Dr. Rice has made many important contributions to the aeronautical telemetry field, especially in regard to communications waveforms and detection algorithms. He has worked extensively with channel modeling, since he is working to fix air-to-ground communication problems. Additionally, he developed a code for signals transmitted from two airplane antennas that eliminates the self-interference from the two signals.
With his extensive research, Dr. Rice attributes much of the success to his graduate students: “I’ve been lucky to have some really good graduate students working with me; mentoring them through their work was the basis for a lot of my accomplishments. That is a very rewarding service.”
When Dr. Rice found out he had been nominated for the award, he was initially surprised and thought he had misheard the message. He expressed how honored he was to be the recipient of the 2019 award, an award that he had actually presented to other ITC members in past years since he is such a central figure in the group.