Born Juan de la Cierva Hoces in Madrid, Spain; son of Don Juan de la Cierva (1895-1936), a Spanish civil engineer and pilot who invented the Autogiro in 1919. After four years of experimentation, la Cierva developed the articulated rotor, which resulted in the world's first successful flight of a stable rotary-wing aircraft in 1924 with his La Cierva C-6 prototype. De la Cierva the younger was educated at the Colegio de Areneros and the Escuela Superior de Ingenieros de Telecomunicación de Madrid. In 1947 he invented a photographic recorder of finishes for horse racing, which met with great success at the Zarzuela in Madrid. He sold the patent to an important Swiss watchmaking house that markets it to this day. It is the system that has been used repeatedly by television, including in the last Olympic Games in Athens. In 1954 de la Cierva was transferred to Cuba, and there he designed and constructed the C-54 helicopter in association with the Compañía Cubana de Aviación. Events in Cuba in 1959 necessitated his family's emigration to the US, where he founded Dynasciences Corporation in Philadelphia, PA, with aeronautical engineers Drs. Leonard Goland and Avraham Perlmutter. He collaborated with them in the formulation and preparation of the "Handbook for Helicopter Stability and Control" for the Department of Defense. At Dynasciences he invented and directed the manufacture of numerous inertial systems, opticial and electro-optical, among which he emphasized the Dynalens stabilizer for cameras, as well as other optical systems installed in helicopters or other airships. In 1970 the Dynalens, used the previous year in numerous documentary films, received a Scientific Award from A.M.P.A.S. for "the best scientific contribution to Cinematography of 1969." The Dynalens is still used today by numerous cameras, as much in professional cinematography and television as in high-end consumer photography. After working on several classified projects for the US Department of Defense, he returned to Spain and continued developing systems for the horseracing industry, many of them utilizing the newly-invented Intel microprocessor. De la Cierva returned to the US in 1979 and continued to develop projects for the Defense Department, including the small C-95 autogyro, a pilotless fly-by-wire observation aircraft with GPS for day or night beach observation prior to landings by US Marines. Then it was back to Spain in 1997, where he still resides. In 2004, he invented the Heligiro.  Scientific or Technical Awards (Class II) 1969 - For the design and development of the Dynalens optical image motion compensator. 1 Scientific/Technical Award