9/1/2007 - The MU College of Engineering announced today the the Dr. Curt Davis, CGI Director and Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, was selected for the Naka Endowed Professorship. The professorship was endowed from a $550k gift from Dr. F. Robert Naka, a 1945 B.S. Electrical Engineering graduate of the MU College of Engineering.
The story of Dr. Naka's life and career is truly amazing. Before attending MU, he was forcibly imprisoned by the U.S. government in the notorious Manzanar Japanese internment camp set up in California during World War II. He was released after 9 months of imprisonment under a special program that allowed some college age males to attend universities in the midwest. After graduating from MU, Dr. Naka went on to study at MIT where he received his PhD. After this, he went on to a distinguished career working for the Department of Defense and industry and made significant contributions to intelligence and surveillance in support of this nation's national security. Notably, he developed stealth technology for the U2 sply plane, was Deputy Director of the National Reconaissance Office (NRO) in the early 1970s, and was Chief Scientist of the Air Force in the mid 1970's. For more information on Dr. Naka's life please see this.

Commenting on this, Dr. Davis said "This is truly a great honor. Dr. Naka's life and accomplishments are a great American story. Much of his work and achievements remain classified even today but they are well known with the national security community, especially for his work at the NRO."

8/20/2007 - Two MU students working in summer interships were recognized by NGA with individual awards for their work. One student intern recieved an award for developing a more efficient means to generate time sensitive geospatial intelligence products "for support of U.S. Special Operations Forces in the global war on terrorism". The other student intern won an intelligence product of the month award for her work in the Office of Asia Pacific. Commenting on these awards, the CGI director, Dr. Davis said "these awards are really unprecedented for students working on summer internships and clearly demonstrate their quality and prepardeness since these students were able to immediately start working on real-world intelligence problems right out of the gate and make such important contributions."

5/20/2007 - The CGI announced today that 5 MU students have been selected by NGA for internships this summer. Four of the MU students are undergraduate students and were selected under NGA's student internship program (STEP). These students have educational backgrounds in Geography, History, and Political Science and all are pursuing minors in GIS. All of these students will be interning in positions within NGA's Production (P) branches in St. Louis. The fifth MU student is a graduate student in Electrical Engineering and was selected under NGA's Visiting Scientist Program. This student has a bacgkround in radar signal processing and will be working for NGA's Innovision directorate in Reston, VA.

3/20/2007 - The $2M construction project to house the Center for Geospatial Intelligence (CGI) was completed in February, 2007. The CGI Director announced today that faculty, staff, and students have recently moved into the labs and offices within the facility and operations have officially begun. Dr. Davis, CGI Director, said that "the specialized facilities will enable the CGI to better support NGA and DoD missions while, at the same time, provide important opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to work on relevant geospatial intelligence problems." MU CoE Dean James Thompson said that "this represents a major committment by the College of Engineering that we believe will uniquely position the CGI to work on problems highly relevant to our nation's security."