GT Aerospace Engineering's Maxime Gariel is the recipient of the 2010 William E. Jackson Award. RTCA annually presents the William E. Jackson Award to an outstanding graduate student in the field of aviation electronics and telecommunications. This award is a memorial to William E. Jackson, a pioneer in the development and implementation of the nation's air traffic control system and an enthusiastic supporter of student engineers. RTCA (Radio-Technical Commission for Aeronautics) is a private, not-for-profit corporation that develops consensus-based recommendations regarding communications, navigation, surveillance, and air traffic management (CNS/ATM) system issues. RTCA functions as a Federal Advisory Committee. Maxime will receive his award at the RTCA's annual symposium, held in June 2011 in Washington D.C. The Honorable Randy Babbitt, FAA administrator, will be the featured speaker at the Awards Luncheon.

Maxime graduated from Ecole Nationale Superieure de l'Aeronautique et de l'Espace in 2007, and he obtained his doctorate from Georgia Tech in 2010. Since then, he has been a post-doctoral associate in the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. His thesis, "Toward a graceful degradation of air traffic management systems" forms the basis for his award. His thesis work was sponsored by Thales and by NASA. and was supervised by Eric Feron, Dutton/Ducoffe Professor of Aerospace Software Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.