Glad she finally got some recognition.

(She passed away two days ago.)

Heres her page on the Space Force “Space Pioneers” page.

https://www.spaceforce.mil/Portals/2/Documents/Space_Pioneer...

West was a person of great faith.

"I think everybody should have God in their life," Gladys says. "I can just about see the complete circle and I can go back and I can look and see what He did and where He put me and where all along. And I would think it's amazing that I didn't understand it at the time, exactly what was happening, but He was there and He was doing it."

https://cbn.com/news/us/everybody-should-have-god-their-life...

https://gideons.org/blog/dr-gladys-west

For anyone not reading the article, she did fundamental work measuring the geoid, the non-spherical corrections to Earth's shape that is fundamental to very accurate GPS positioning.

Here's some pictures of the EGM2008 geoid we use today: https://francis.naukas.com/files/2023/07/D20230711-Computers...

Gladys West deserves to have her name added to the list of notable Aptronyms, globally positioned alongside Tiger Woods and William Wordsworth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym#Notable_examples

I'm glad she got her flowers in the end. As a fellow Hokie who was in school around then I wish I knew of her and her accomplishments while I was a student. She was a distance learning PhD student so would have only been in Blacksburg occasionally.