Trevor Sorensen
Born in Brisbane, Australia, Dr. Sorensen received his BS. (1973), M.S. (1976) and Doctor of Engineering (1979) degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Kansas (KU).
He did his doctoral project on Pioneer Venus at NASA Ames Research Center. He then was a Space Shuttle guidance and control engineer, worked in Mission Control as assistant Flight Director, and finally was a software engineering manager supporting Shuttle missions. In 1990, Dr. Sorensen was the Observations Manager for the SDIO LACE satellite. In 1994, he was the Lunar Mission Manager for the DoD/NASA Clementine lunar mission for which he received the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement. He was then the Program Manager for the Space R&D contract at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) under which the USAF MSTI-3 satellite was operated, and in 1997 the technical lead for Honeywell’s commercial satellite ground network, DataLynx. From 2000-2007 he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Kansas. In 2007 he joined the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa as a specialist professor and project manager in the Hawai‘i Space Flight Laboratory (HSFL). He became tenured faculty in 2012. In December, 2014 Dr. Sorensen and two colleagues (Miguel Nunes and Eric Pilger) started a technology spin-off company from the University of Hawaiʻi called Interstel Technologies, Inc. This company is developing and marketing a program for comprehensive mission operations called COSMOS that was developed at HSFL under a NASA contract.
Dr. Sorensen is the chief designer of the COSMOS architecture and is the PI of the NASA STTR contract to develop iCOSMOS-Swarm™. He is a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and was on the AIAA Board of Directors as the Director of the Space and Missiles Group, which consisted of 14 technical committees. In 2021 Dr. Sorensen was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by the International Space Operations Organization.