People
Founded and led by a team of scientists and engineers, GeoOptics focuses on finding answers to some of the most important challenges facing the globe.
Thomas Yunck
Company Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Long-time NASA technical manager and researcher; pioneered the use of GPS for civil and scientific applications; past chairman of the Foundation for Earth Science; inductee into the Space Foundation’s Space Technology Hall of Fame. In 1988, Tom wrote the first proposal for exploiting GPS signals to sound the Earth’s atmosphere for weather and climate applications. Since then he has been involved in every aspect of its development and validation. He holds the basic patent on the state space approach to Wide Area Differential GPS positioning, which has grown into a $100M/year industry and received a BSEE from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Yale University.
Benetge Perera
Vice President, Programs
Dr. Perera’s expertise lies in data modeling and simulation, data analytics, statistical/mathematical techniques, machine learning and predictive analysis, and Bayesian analysis. At GeoOptics he has developed data processing and evaluation techniques for new data types, including simulating and modeling observations and developing algorithms to process space radar data. Dr. Perera was previously a scientist at the University of Central Florida where he used radio telescopes to observe pulsars and transients to study fundamental physics, led pulsar and FRB projects with the Arecibo 12-m telescope, and was a principal member of the Pulsar Timing Array team that achieved breakthrough detection of low-frequency gravitational waves.
