January 14, 2016
The department welcomes new faculty member Brandon Jones, who joins us this spring as an assistant professor. Before joining UT Austin, Jones was a research assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he also received his Ph.D. Prior to starting his graduate studies, he was a contractor at the NASA Johnson Space Center and received undergraduate degrees in mathematics and physics from UT Austin.
Jones’ research interests are primarily in space situational awareness, particularly detection, tracking, identification, and characterization of orbital debris. Recent work leverages Bayesian multi-target filtering to account for ambiguities in data association for thousands of targets and to enable optimal scheduling of cooperative and non-cooperative sensors.
In addition to his work in space domain awareness, he also researches tractable methods for mission design under uncertainty for satellites in highly perturbed environments. These algorithms leverage conjunction assessment tools previously developed and used in the ground system for NASA’s Magnetospheric Multi-Scale (MMS) mission, which was launched in March 2015.
What attracted you to UT Austin?
The opportunity to work with great faculty and the resources available at this esteemed university.
What do you enjoy most about engineering or your specific field?
It is a wonderful blend of my favorite research topics: mathematics, numerical analysis, dynamics, and estimation. I am constantly learning new things about each of these areas.
What are your favorite hobbies?
Traveling to foreign countries, learning something new about a topic I know very little about, and spending time with family and friends.
