Karlton Wirsing is a senior software engineer at Intelsat and has held the position for three years. During this time, he received Masters degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Virginia Polytechnic and State University as well as an NSA certified graduate certificate in Information Assurance. He is currently working on a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Virginia Tech, extending his graduate research on the use of Wavelet Transform for signal filtering and the identification of self-similar and fractal signals to real world data on space weather and on Pulsars. While studying at Virginia Tech, Karlton calculated the link budget for the Cassini Space probe and showed that a cell phone in geosynchronous orbit could produce a stronger signal than Cassini. His work at Intelsat includes maintaining the ground control system software that supports $400 million worth of satellites, and while there, he has added satellites to the software and participated in the launching of entirely new satellites. Karlton’s scholarship will help fund the research credits he needs to complete his Ph.D. program, from which he hopes to graduate next year.

Karlton received SSPI’s International Scholarship in 2015.

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