People Category: AIAA Aviation Forum 2019

Ivett A. Leyva became the Associate Dean for Research at the new Texas A&M Fort Worth campus in August 2025. She is tasked with starting a new engineering research enterprise in this new campus. She was head of the Department of Aerospace Engineering from 2021 to 2025. Previously, she worked at the Air Force for 15 years. For 6 years, she was the program officer for Hypersonic Aerodynamics at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), and prior to that, she was a researcher at the AFRL Rocket Lab working on liquid rocket instabilities. Her technical expertise is in hypersonic aerodynamics and liquid rocket engines. Ivett holds a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree from Caltech. Her Ph.D. was in Aeronautics. Ivett has six patents and has authored numerous papers and two book chapters. She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Royal Aeronautical Society, and the Air Force Research Laboratory. She is a National Associate of the National Research Council of the National Academies, and a recipient of a Civilian Achievement Medal and two meritorious Civilian Service Awards and Medals from the Air Force.

Richard P. Hallion is a Trustee of Florida Polytechnic University. He also serves as an advisor to the Royal Air Force Centre for Air Power Studies (RAF-CAPS) and as a consultant to various organizations, including the Mitchell Institute of the Air Force Association, and the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI) of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). Previously, Dr. Hallion was a founding museum curator at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution; served as a Historian with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Air Force; held the General Harold Keith Johnson Chair of Military History at the U.S. Army War College; ran the USAF History and Museums Program; and was a senior advisor on aerospace technology and policy for the Secretary of the Air Force. He has flying experience as a mission observer (not pilot) in a wide range of military and civil aircraft, and is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Royal Aeronautical Society, and the Royal Historical Society. Dr. Hallion received a Ph.D in history from the University of Maryland, and completed postgraduate executive study programs at the Federal Executive Institute and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has served on several study panels for the Air Force Studies Board and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine projects, including defense against future high-speed threats and meeting future Air Force Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce needs.

David Richwine received his Bachelor of Science/Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Virginia in 1983 and Masters in Engineering Administration from The George Washington University in 1986. He has worked in aeronautics research for over 35 years at NASA Langley and Dryden Flight Research Center (now Armstrong). During his 17 years at NASA DFRC, he initially worked aerodynamics, structures, flow visualization, and flight systems for the F-18 High Alpha Research Program; and other experiments on the X-29, B-52, SR-71, and various F-18 research aircraft. Later duties included technical and project management of the F-15B Flight Research Testbed and various subsonic and supersonic flight experiments. Later, he served as Dryden’s Project Manager for DARPA’s Quiet Supersonic Program (QSP) and F-5E flight test. After moving to NASA Langley in 2003, he has served in several positions supporting NASA supersonics research. In 2012, David became the planning lead and then project manager for the low-boom flight demonstrator concept studies which ultimately evolved into the Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) Preliminary Design. He is now serving at the Deputy Project Manager for Technology on the Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator (LBFD) Project coordinating technical requirements and capabilities across the LBFD Mission. David has been an AIAA member for over 25 years.

Davis Hackenberg is currently serving the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) as the Project Manager for the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) project and also serves as the Strategic Advisor for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) to the ARMD Associate Administrator. He performs his duties from NASA Headquarters in Washington DC. Project Management duties for AAM include leading development and implementation of the UAM mission spanning all relevant ARMD project and center research activities with the goal of implementing the NASA UAM investment strategy in a manner that accelerates UAM.  Davis is responsible for strategic and technical management, including integration with multiple government agencies ensuring that the products of this effort are relevant and will be utilized by all customers and stakeholders.

Dr. Bryan Barmore has a PhD in nuclear physics from the College of William and Mary and a BS inphysics from Ohio University. He is the Deputy Project Manager for Technology for NASA’s Air TrafficManagement – Exploration project where he leads the technology development for future airspaceconcepts enabling safe and efficient access to the airspace for all users. Previously he was a research engineer in NASA Langley’s Crew Systems and Aviation Operations Branch. From 2002 – 2015 he led NASA’s Interval Management research team. Bryan was active in the development of international standards for Interval Management including the publication of multiple RTCA and EUROCAE documents. He led the development of the FAA’s Interval Management concept of operations. From2015-2017, Bryan led the Langley’s Advanced Four-Dimensional Trajectory (4DT) research team in NASA’s SMART NAS for Efficient Trajectory-Based Operations project.

Dr. Barmore’s research interest include improving the operational efficiency and safety of air transportation for existing and new users and operations and enabling new operational paradigms to coexist with existing airspace users. Bryan continues to work to empower users to have a more activerole in airspace management through digital information exchange and distributed control paradigms.

Prior to coming to NASA, Bryan was a research fellow at the Joint Institute for Heavy Ion Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he studied the structure of extreme nuclei. Dr. Barmore was amember of the team that was awarded the 2007 Robert J. Collier Trophy for the development of ADS-Band ADS-B applications. He is the recipient of the NASA Exception Achievement Medal and multiple RTCA and NASA awards. He has over 40 publications in ATM and physics research.

Mr. Montgomery oversees the integration and management of institutional capability within ARMD, including workforce and research facilities. He is responsible for evaluating the effective and consistent implementation of ARMD’s partnership strategy. He also oversees implementation and evaluation of the mission directorate’s public communication strategy.

Previously as deputy associate administrator for management, Montgomery led the institutional responsibilities of ARMD, ensuring strategic business processes were in place to effectively plan and implement the directorate’s mission. He also led the development and execution of ARMD strategies with respect to technical capabilities, partnerships, external communication, human resources, and review and evaluation of programs for program planning and execution.

Prior to that, as director of ARMD’s Integration and Management Office, Montgomery was responsible for managing key directorate processes and activities including strategic communications, education and outreach, integration of ARMD and agency strategic planning and performance reporting, various program support activities including internal reviews, and program, human capital and mission support resources and technology requirements.

Before joining NASA in 2009, Montgomery was responsible for policies related to research and development, international trade, and global competitiveness of the U.S. aerospace industry in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration. He participated in multilateral negotiations related to aviation environmental standards, research and development, and trade finance policies. He also represented the Department of Commerce in several national initiatives to foster the health of the U.S. aeronautics enterprise, including creation of the National Aeronautics Research and Development Policy and Plan, establishment of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) initiative, and assessment of federal policies as the Global Issues staff lead for the Presidential Commission on the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry. Montgomery previously served as policy advisor to senior Commerce Department of cials coordinating trade policies related to aerospace, information technology and all other U.S. industrial sectors.

He has received several group and individual commendations from the Department of Commerce, the Department of State, and the Executive Office of the President. He has published multiple reports and given presentations at national and international conferences on competitiveness policies affecting U.S. aerospace manufacturers and served as guest lecturer at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Business for several years.

Montgomery began his career in 1993 at the U.S. Department of Commerce as a presidential management intern. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Knox College in Illinois, and a master’s degree in public affairs from the University of Wisconsin’s La Follette Institute of Public Affairs.

Michael E. White became the Assistant Director for Hypersonics (AD,H) in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD R&E) on October 29, 2018. In that capacity Mr. White is responsible for leading the Nation’s vision and strategy for developing warfighting capability enabled by hypersonic systems, including; high speed strike systems, systems to defend against adversary hypersonic weapons, and future reusable global reach systems.

Before his OUSD position as AD, H, Mr. White was Sector Head for Air and Missile Defense at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory where he led over 1,100 staff members developing advanced concepts to enhance the Nation’s air and missile defense (AMD) capability for programs in the Navy and the Missile Defense Agency. His 37 year career at APL included over two decades of leadership developing hypersonic concepts and technologies, strike systems and air and missile defense capabilities.

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James R. Hansen has written about aerospace history and the history of science and technology for the past thirty years. He has published books and articles on a wide variety of topics ranging from the early days of aviation, the first nuclear fusion reactors, and the Moon landings, to the environmental history of golf courses.

His book, First Man (Simon & Schuster, 2005), the first and only authorized biography of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, spent three weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and has garnered several major book awards including the American Astronautical Society’s Eugene Emme Prize for Astronautical Literature and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Outstanding Book Award. First Man has also been published in the United Kingdom and in Japanese translation and is scheduled to appear in Chinese, Russian, Croatian, and Turkish. The film rights to the book are held by Universal Studios and a screenplay for the film has recently been completed by Mike Rich, whose movie screenwriting credits include Finding Forrester, The Rookie, Miracle, Radio, The Nativity Story, and the 2010 Disney release Secretariat.

Jim’s newest book, Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: The Inside Story of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster, was published in May 2009 by the University Press of Florida. Several reviewers of the book (co-authored by Allan J. McDonald) have called it “the definitive study” of the Challenger accident. He is currently at work turning the memoirs of veteran astronaut and Moonwalker John Young into a published autobiography.

In 1995 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration nominated Hansen’s book Spaceflight Revolution for a Pulitzer Prize, the only time NASA has ever made such a nomination. His book From the Ground Up (1988) won the History Book Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His scholarship has also been honored with the Robert H. Goddard Award from the National Space Club and certificates of distinction from the Air Force Historical Foundation. His books, The Bird is on the Wing (Texas A&M University Press) and The Wind and Beyond (NASA) explore the role of aerodynamics in the progress of the airplane in America. The latter is a six volume series prepared by Hansen and a team of his graduate students for NASA, three volumes of which have now been published. In 2005 the first volume of The Wind and Beyond won the Society for the History of Technology’s Eugene Ferguson Prize for Outstanding Reference Work.

Dr. Hansen has served on a number of important advisory boards and panels, including the Research Advisory Board of the National Air and Space Museum, the Editorial Advisory Board of the Smithsonian Institution Press, and the Advisory Board for the Archives of Aerospace Exploration at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is also a past vice-president of the Virginia Air and Space Museum in Hampton, Virginia.

At Auburn University, Hansen has served as the Director of the Auburn University Honors College since 2006. In the four years he has been director, the total enrollment of the Honors College has tripled; the size of the incoming freshman class has quadrupled; and there has been a comprehensive reformulation of the entire Honors curriculum, with a greater emphasis on interdisciplinary studies, undergraduate research, and study abroad.

Although most of his scholarly work has dealt with aerospace history, Hansen has also made his mark on the field of golf course history. He has published numerous articles on the subject in golf magazines and given scholarly and public presentations on the history of golf course architecture in the United States, Canada, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England. He is currently working on the authorized biography of Robert Trent Jones Sr., the eminent American golf course architect whose work came to define many features of American golf. At Auburn he also teaches an undergraduate seminar on the history of golf course architecture.

Jim has taught history at Auburn University since 1986. His teaching and research has received numerous awards and accolades from the university including the Teaching Excellence Award in the Humanities, an Alumni Professorship, the Outstanding Teacher in the Core Curriculum, and the Office of the Vice President for Research’s Creative Research Award. In 2005, he was inducted into the College of Liberal Arts’ Academy of Teaching and Outstanding Scholars.

A native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, he earned his PhD at Ohio State University in 1981. Students who have earned graduate degrees under Hansen’s direction at Auburn currently hold positions at the University of Central Florida, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Air and Space Museum, U.S. Air Force Academy, U.S. Air Force Air War College, and with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Education

• PhD, The Ohio State University
• MA, The Ohio State University
• BA, Indiana University

Representative Publications

Books

• First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (Simon & Schuster, 2005)
• From the Ground Up, by James R. Hansen and Fred E. Weick (Smithsonian, 1988)
• The Bird Is on the Wing: Aerodynamics and the Progress of the American Airplane (Texas A&M University Press, 2003)
• The Wind and Beyond (NASA, 2003), a six-volume series prepared by Hansen and a team of his graduate students for NASA
• Spaceflight Revolution: NASA Langley Research Center From Sputnik to Apollo (NASA History Series, 1995)

Last Updated: August 29, 2018