Alumnus and Trustee Simon Ramo Awarded the Goddard Memorial Trophy

Simon Ramo, EE Ph.D. '36 and Life Trustee of Caltech, has been awarded the Goddard Memorial Trophy.  This award is the National Space Club’s preeminent award and it is given annually to recognize significant contribution to United States leadership in the field of rocketry and astronautics. 

Dr. Ramo earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Magna Cum Laude at age 23 and then joined the General Electric Research Laboratories where he accumulated 25 patents before the age of 30 and was cited as one of America’s most outstanding young electrical engineers. He was the first in the U.S. to produce microwave pulses at the kilowatt level and the first to create the so-called cavity resonator magnetron (an approach which later become the power source for World War II’s Microwave Radar).

Dr. Ramo has been involved with the creation of two Fortune 500 companies of the 1970s; Ramo-Wooldridge (TRW after 1958) and Bunker-Ramo (now part of Honeywell). TRW was a pioneer in multiple fields including electronic components, integrated circuits, computers, software and systems engineering. TRW built many spacecraft, including Pioneer 1, Pioneer 10, and several space-based observatories. [Learn more]