Samuel Low Awarded The Gerald J. Lieberman Fellowship 2026/27

I am pleasantly surprised and honoured to learn that I've been selected as a Gerald J. Lieberman Fellow at Stanford University. Each year, 12 doctoral students university-wide, at their 5th year or later, are awarded on the basis of purposeful and meaningful contributions in research, teaching, and service. This recognition means a lot to me, but honestly, it speaks volumes more about the incredible people around me who believe in my work, have made me a better researcher and teacher, and who have built incredible things with me. I am thankful to DSO National Laboratories for their generous support of my PhD thus far, and for believing in me right from the very roots of my career. I thank my PhD advisor, Professor Simone D'Amico, for his generous nomination, guidance, wisdom, and rigour. And of course, I thank the entire Stanford Space Rendezvous Laboratory (SLAB): they are the giants on whose shoulders I stand, and who have shaped me through their brilliant ideas, engaging discourse and meaningful exchange.

Finding one's direction in school, in a career, or in a PhD, rarely comes easy. I was never academically gifted, nor did I have a clear path for a long time. But I was always curious. I remember collecting bugs in the school garden, watching my critter swarms moving in formation, as if they had collective emergent intelligence. I also spent many quiet afternoons in the library reading about planets, satellites, and rockets. I didn't know it then, but looking back, it seems my research interests were taking shape long before I knew what a PhD was. As the saying goes, you can only connect the dots in hindsight.

Today, in my lab, we work on cutting edge guidance, navigation, control, safety and autonomy technologies that enables satellites in formations and swarms to achieve new capabilities and new science that a traditionally monolithic satellite could not. Two really cool missions I'm involved in for navigation development are (1) VISORS, a distributed space telescope for heliophysics, and (2) STARI, a distributed starlight interferometer. Both missions push the boundaries of what is possible with distributed space systems, and demand navigation performance at unprecedented precision in real time, on embedded space flight hardware. This is what I've dedicated my PhD to, and it has been a long, windy, and fun road thus far!