Penina Axelrad
Penina Axelrad is an American aerospace engineer who studies how satellites move and how GPS works. She is the Joseph T. Negler Professor at the University of Colorado, in the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research and the Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department.
She earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering at MIT in 1985 and 1986, and she was the captain of MIT’s fencing team. She completed her Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1991, working on Gravity Probe B with Bradford Parkinson. After a year as a Stanford lecturer and time in industry, she joined the University of Colorado as an assistant professor in 1992 and became a full professor in 2005. She led the aerospace engineering sciences department from 2012 to 2017.
Axelrad serves on the GPS Advisory Board and the NASA Advisory Council. She was president of The Institute of Navigation in 2004–2005.
Her awards and honors include the Lawrence Sperry Award (1996), the Institute of Navigation’s Tycho Brahe Award (2002) and Kepler Award (2009), and the Aerospace Educator Award from Women in Aerospace (2015). She was named a Fellow of The Institute of Navigation (2004) and a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2008). She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019. The University of Colorado named her the Joseph T. Negler Professor in 2018.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 06:20 (CET).