John A. Cavolowsky Director, Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program, NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) NASA

John Cavolowsky is responsible for the overall planning, management, and evaluation of ARMD’s efforts to cultivate revolutionary concepts, tools, and technologies that enable aviation transformation. TACP solicits and encourages ideas, creates the environment for researchers to experiment with those ideas, explores broadly-critical technologies, develops new computational and experimental tools, performs ground and small-scale flight tests, allows failures and learning from them, and drives turnover into future concepts and first-of-a-kind capabilities.

He also supports the ARMD associate administrator in a broad range of mission directorate activities, including strategic planning and external coordination.

Previously, Cavolowsky was director of the Airspace Operations and Safety Program, where he led overall planning, management, and evaluation of ARMD’s efforts in foundational air traffic management and operational safety research that enables development of revolutionary improvements to, and modernization of, the National Airspace System.

Prior positions include director of the former Aviation Systems Program, deputy program director and associate program manager for the Airspace Systems Program, and project manager for the Human Measures and Performance Project.

Cavolowsky began his NASA career in 1989 at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California as a technical lead and research manager for aerothermodynamics, addressing research and development challenges in hypersonic propulsion and thermal protection systems. He also served as a technical manager for aerospace programs in the Office of the Center Director at NASA Ames and has published more than 25 technical papers.

Cavolowsky has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.

Official Bio