Jim Murphy is Senior Integration Engineer at Crown Innovations.
He is focused on integrating partners into the environment being developed at NASA for the testing of urban air mobility (UAM) airspace concepts. He also leverages his systems engineering background to facilitate advancements in aviation and airspace integration for all Crown’s clients.
Murphy has 30-plus years of experience in airspace management research and development. While at NASA, he led efforts to utilize model-based systems engineering approaches in aerospace research and the development of flight test environments for UAS aircraft. He also managed the development of software programs designed to research advanced air traffic management decision support tools.
In his early career, he stood up a distributed Live, Virtual, Constructive (LVC) test environment to streamline the transition between in-lab virtual simulations and live flight test encounters between live and virtual aircraft. This LVC test environment enabled facilities across all four NASA aeronautics centers to effectively collaborate in the development of UAS command and control and detect and avoid standards.
At NASA, Murphy served five years as the AAM System Architect within the AAM Mission Integration Office. He served as NASA’s lead for organizing and capturing candidate system architectural requirements, providing a baseline for initial research into AAM concepts. He worked across industry, federal, state and local stakeholders to capture and organize candidate AAM architecture components, ensuring consistency and completeness of the overall system.
Murphy has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from Western Michigan University and Michigan State University, respectively. In 2014, he was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Achievement Medal for his work in the development of the LVC test environment. He is an AIAA Associate Fellow and is a past chair of the AIAA Software Technical Committee.
