West was born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, to a farming family in a community of sharecroppers. As a girl growing up in Dinwiddie County south of Richmond in the late 1930’s early 1940’s, all Gladys (maiden name, Brown) knew was that she did not want to work in the fields, picking tobacco, corn and cotton, or in a nearby factory, beating tobacco leaves into pieces small enough for cigarettes and pipes, as her parents did. After gaining a scholarship for achieving the first place in her high-school class, she studied mathematics at Virginia State College (now known as Virginia State University). After graduating she taught for around two years in Sussex County before she went back to school for her master’s degree.
In 1956, West began to work at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, where she was the second black woman ever to be employed. When West joined the Naval Surface Warfare Center, she was one of just four black employees, two of whom were men. One of those men, Ira West, would later become her husband. West began to collect data from satellites, eventually leading to the development of Global Positioning System. Her supervisor Ralph Neiman recommended her as project manager for the Seasat radar altimetry project, the first satellite that could remotely sense oceans. In 1979, Neiman recommended West for commendation. West was a programmer in the Dahlgren Division for large-scale computers and a project manager for data-processing systems used in the analysis of satellite data.
In 1986, West published “Data Processing System Specifications for the Geosat Satellite Radar Altimeter”, a 60-page illustrated guide. The guide was published to explain how to increase the accuracy of the estimation of “geoid heights and vertical deflection”, topics of satellite geodesy. This was achieved by processing the data created from the radio altimeter on the Geosat satellite which went into orbit on 12 March 1984. She worked at Dahlgren for 42 years, retiring in 1998. Her contributions to GPS were only uncovered when a member of West’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, read a short biography West had submitted for an alumni function.
After West retired in 1998, she did not stop her pursuit of knowledge. In 2018, she completed her Ph.D. through a remote program with Virginia Tech. On December 6, 2018, the 87-year-old West was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame by the United States Air Force during a ceremony at the Pentagon. A press release from the Air Force Space Command detailed West’s contributions, “Dr. Gladys West is among a small group of women who did computing for the U.S. military in the era before electronic systems. Hired in 1956 as a mathematician at the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, she participated in a path-breaking, award-winning astronomical study that proved, during the early 1960s, the regularity of Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune. Thereafter, from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, using complex algorithms to account for variations in gravitational, tidal, and other forces that distort Earth’s shape, she programmed an IBM 7030 ‘Stretch’ computer to deliver increasingly refined calculations for an extremely accurate geodetic Earth model, a geoid, optimized for what ultimately became the Global Positioning System (GPS) orbit.”
Also in 2018, as an alumna of Virginia State University, West won the award for "Female Alumna of the Year" at the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Awards and was selected by the BBC as part of their 100 Women. In 2021, she was awarded the Prince Philip Medal by the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering, their highest individual honor. In 2024, Virginia's Fredericksburg City School Board voted to name its third elementary school in her honor: Gladys West Elementary School.
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