Wouter Pelgrum

Dr. Wouter Pelgrum has over two decades of experience in electronic navigation with systems such as eLoran, GNSS, eDME, and modalities including timing, indoor, pedestrian, automotive, maritime, aviation, and space.

Currently, Wouter is a Principal Navigation Engineer at Blue Origin where he leads a team of navigation experts toward the research, implementation, validation, and verification of various navigation solutions used for the company’s space missions.

Before Blue Origin, Wouter was a Senior Director from 2016-2020 at the Silicon Valley startup NextNav, spearheading the engineering of timing, indoor, pedestrian, automotive, and drone navigation and precision transmitter calibration and synchronization, based on NextNav’s TerraPoiNT radio navigation signal.

From 2009-2016, Wouter taught and researched electronic navigation topics as a tenured associate professor at Ohio University. Research projects included the development and flight-testing of an eDME system as a candidate solution for FAAs Alternative Positioning Navigation and Timing (APNT) program, the study of the impact of ionosphere scintillation on GNSS signal propagation for AFOSR, and VLF and LF navigation for DARPA’s Spherics-Based Underground Positioning (S-BUG) program.