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Advances in communications have changed the battlefield. With secure satellite communications, leaders in the United States can direct forces in Afghanistan in real time, tactical aircraft can come to the rescue of pinned-down infantry, and drones can take out high-profile targets while their operators are safe behind a computer screen far away.

And some part of the credit for this transformation can go to a former Moultrian.

David R. McElroy Jr., project manager for the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be recognized for his success next week with the 2014 Colquitt County Career Achievement Award.

The third annual award will be presented during a dinner event Thursday, March 6, at 6:30 p.m. at the Colquitt County Arts Center. Tickets are available for $50 at the Moultrie-Colquitt County Chamber of Commerce.

Previous recipients are Wayne Littles, a retired NASA administrator, and Terry Turner, a medical researcher and professor at the University of Virginia.

McElroy was born Sept. 27, 1942, in Orlando, Fla., to the late David Richard McElroy and Louise Roberts McElroy. His family moved to Moultrie in 1945 and his one sibling, the late Wayne Roberts McElroy, was born in Moultrie.

David  McElroy attended Central Elementary, Moultrie Junior High School, and Moultrie High School, graduating in 1960. He is an honors graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology from which he earned B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering. At Georgia Tech, he was inducted into four honor societies: Sigma Xi (research), Tau Beta Pi (engineering), Phi Kappa Phi (senior), and Eta Kappa Nu (electrical engineering). He received a National Defense Education Act Fellowship for graduate studies.

In 1964, McElroy and his high-school sweetheart, Sandra Kay Davis, were married in Moultrie. After graduate school, McElroy served as a U. S. Army officer with a tour as a communications researcher at the Army Electronics Command at Ft. Monmouth, N.J., followed by a tour in Vietnam during which he was awarded the Bronze Star.

 In 1972 McElroy joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, a non-profit research and development center focusing on electronic systems pertinent to national defense. His career at Lincoln Laboratory has involved enhancing the capacity and improving the robustness of government communications systems, especially satellite communications (satcom) systems.  

Today, he is the program manager for a large cross-discipline effort to mature free-space optical communications technologies to enable very high-data-rate readout of advanced sensor platforms. Critical aspects of this development are advanced signaling and error-correcting coding techniques that allow the use of very small apertures (inch-class telescopes) that are easy to integrate onto host platforms and innovative pointing, acquisition and tracking approaches to accurately direct beams of a few hundred yards in diameter from potentially tens of thousands of miles away.

Much of McElroy’s career at MIT has involved the synthesis of new concepts and architectures for next-generation (radio frequency) satcom systems, research into bandwidth-efficient signaling and resource allocation techniques for future protected satcom and aerial relay communications systems, technology transition to the industrial base, and leveraging the laboratory’s proof-of-concept implementations as Reference Standard test instruments to reduce risk as the government incorporates Lincoln Laboratory developed communications, concepts, and technologies.

He was Lincoln Laboratory’s program manager for the Fleet Satcom Extremely High Frequency (EHF) Package, an on-orbit proof-of-concept demonstration of technologies critical for the Department of Defense’s highly protected Milstar Satcom system. He also directed the subsequent waveform development, prototyping, and establishment of a nationally deployed risk-reduction test infrastructure for the significantly higher-capacity Advanced EHF SATCOM System, which started replacing Milstar in 2010.

In addition, he directed Lincoln Laboratory’s architectural, prototyping, and end-to-end test infrastructure development for a potential generation-after-next wideband protected satcom system, a multiple-discipline effort leveraging optical, protected bandwidth-efficient signaling, and packet switching/routing technologies that would provide an “Internet in the Sky” capability.

Sponsors for his projects have included the Air Force, Army, Navy, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and several other government agencies.

McElroy has served on satellite communications architecture studies for the National Research Council, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, DARPA, the Naval Studies Board, and the Air Force. He has been a member of NASA’s Space Systems and Technology Advisory Committee and has consulted for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and on weather satellite systems and for the Department of State on export control issues pertinent to advanced satcom technologies.

He has chaired the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Technical Committee on Communications Systems. In this capacity he presented AIAA’s views in support of NASA’s Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS) to a Congressional Committee.

McElroy is a member of the Military Communications Conference Board which provides overall guidance and policies for the organization of the annual Military Communications (MILCOM) conference sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA). He has organized the technical program for several MILCOM conferences.

McElroy has prepared hundreds of technical reports, journal articles, conference papers, and program review presentations.

In 2009 he was honored with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Technical Excellence Award “For sustained contributions to the Department of Defense’s MILSATCOM program, for critical contributions to the nation’s communications priority, and for perfecting a method to transition Lincoln Laboratory technology to industry through the use of ‘gold standard’ test instruments.”

McElroy and his wife, who currently live in Westford, Mass., have four children and six grandchildren. His interests include family activities, skiing, golfing, and biking.