Marc Higginson-Rollins has received the Outstanding Student Paper Award, given by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) to a very small fraction of student presenters from the AGU’s recent annual meeting. He will be presented with the award at AGU’s Fall 2018 meeting to be held December 10-14 in Washington, D.C.

Higginson-Rollins is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and works in the Low Frequency Radio Group. He is advised by ECE Assistant Professor Morris B. Cohen.

The award is based on Higginson-Rollins’ presentation entitled “LF/MF Propagation Modeling for D-Region Ionospheric Remote Sensing." His work focuses on remotely sensing the D-region of the ionosphere, 60-90 km altitude, that is too high for balloons and too low for satellites, making it difficult to measure and characterize. At the same time, the D-region affects communication, navigation, and satellite signals, so being able to track it is of critical importance to a number of applications.

Higginson-Rollins’ work focuses on the use of an extensive set of beacons at 300 kHz called NDGPS, nominally for navigation, but he has a serendipitous purpose in scientific remote sensing of the D-region. Utilizing measurements taken across the country in Low Frequency Radio Group receiver field sites, combined with theoretical simulations of LF radio propagation and plasma reflections, Higginson-Rollins’ work will open a new method for ionospheric characterization that will be the basis for his dissertation. He is also a current recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and this work falls under Dr. Cohen's recent NSF CAREER award.