People Category: Speaker

Corbett Hoenninger is Senior Vice President of Engineering at Sierra Space. Having played a formative leadership role in the Sierra Space engineering team over the last 10 years, Corbett has brought a great depth of engineering knowledge and expertise as a key member of the original Dream Chaser Engineering team that led to a successful test flight in 2017.

Prior to Sierra Space, Corbett worked at NASA Johnson Space Center on the Space Shuttle and International Space Station (ISS) programs.

Before entering the space industry, Corbett served as a Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy on the USS Enterprise.

Corbett has a Bachelor and Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University and a Master of Science in Physics from the University of Houston Clear Lake.

Official Bio

Don Farr is a Senior Technical Fellow (STF) in Model Based Engineering (MBE) supporting the Digital Transformation initiative at Boeing from Huntsville Alabama.  The past 7 years have been spent evaluation and integration of advanced technology into Boeing’s development environment across the lifecycle of programs. He has 36 years of System Engineering experience working on dozens of programs; 31 years at Boeing working Defense and Commercial platforms/systems, 5 years at General Dynamics on fighter platforms. Don earned his BSEE at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, specializing in digital communications and computer architectures. He went on to complete an advanced degree in electrical engineering at the University of Delaware in Newark, also specializing in digital communications.

Barry Tilton is the Technology Evangelist for Maxar Technologies. He has over 36 years’ experience as an Electrical Engineer in the aerospace field and is both a Licensed Professional Engineer and Certified Project Management Professional. He is a 20-year veteran of the US Air Force, where he had over 1000 flight hours as a test director, and worked as a Chief Engineer, and Chief Scientist, and Program Director for the US Defense and State Departments as well as several international efforts with countries on five Continents.

Barry earned his BSEE from USC and his MSEE from Northrop University. He is a Senior Member of AIAA. IEEE, Eta Kappa Nu and the IEEE, a life member of the USGIF and a Fellow of the American Geographical Society. He is currently Director of IEEE Region 2 (the US Mid-Atlantic). His current work includes expanding the applications of Maxar solutions, including remote sensing, 3D data and mapping technologies, analytics and space environment characterization.

While Carlson was SRI’s CEO, its revenue more than tripled and SRI became a global model for the creation of high-value innovations, such as HDTV, Intuitive Surgical, and Siri, now on the iPhone. These innovations created tens of billions of dollars of new economic value.

He served on President Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the SAB of Taiwan, and the Board of the Singapore National Research Foundation. He helped write the 2017 National Academy report on improving the performance of NSF’s R&D and innovation centers.

Before joining SRI, Carlson worked at RCA Laboratories, GE, and the Sarnoff Corporation. His teams have won two Emmys, one for HDTV. He has helped form over two dozen new companies. In 2006, he won the Otto Schade Prize from the Society for Information Display for his work on image quality.

He is a “WPI Luminary,” an award given to 11 leaders over the university’s 150-year history. Carlson is a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and has received four honorary degrees. With William Wilmot he wrote Innovation, selected by BusinessWeek as a 2006 Top-10 business book.

Practice of Innovation, LLC, works with companies, governments, and universities on improving innovative performance. Their methodology, Innovation-for-Impact (i4i), is used by companies and government agencies in the US, Sweden, Finland, Chile, China, Japan, and Taiwan.

Carlson received his B.S. degree in physics, Tau Beta Pi, from WPI. His M.S. and Ph.D. degrees are from Rutgers University. Carlson has published and presented extensively and holds fundamental patents in the fields of image quality, image coding, and computer vision.

Dr. Jonathan Gardner is the Deputy Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope and also serves as the Chief of the Laboratory for Observational Cosmology in the Astrophysics Science Division of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He has worked at Goddard since 1996, except for a brief term as a Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. in 2004.

Gardner was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in the small town of Goshen, Indiana. He attended Harvard University where he received his Bachelors degree in Astronomy in Astrophysics in 1986. While Gardner was an undergraduate student, he spent the summers of 1985 and 1986 as a student intern at Goddard, working on an early design of the Infrared Array Camera for the Spitzer Space Telescope.

He attended graduate school at the University of Hawaii, earning a Master’s degree and then a PhD in Astronomy in 1992, studying the evolution of galaxies using infrared observations. Following graduate school, Gardner won a NSF-NATO Fellowship to pursue his research at the University of Durham in England. In 1996 he returned to Goddard to work with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, a camera that was installed on the Hubble Space Telescope in 1997.

Gardner is interested in how galaxies formed as small clumps of stars early in the history of the universe and evolved into the big, bright galaxies we see today. To see the very distant galaxies, long exposures with Hubble, Spitzer and large ground-based telescopes are needed. He has been involved with studies using the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), projects that involve large teams of astronomers and push the observatories to their limits. JWST will reach beyond the capabilities of Hubble and Spitzer to find the formation of the first galaxies.

He began working with Webb as a member of the Ad-Hoc Science Working Group in the late 1990s, and joined the Project as the Deputy Senior Project Scientist in 2002. In this role, he helps the Senior Project Scientist, Dr. John Mather, watch over the scientific performance of the telescope. He also helps manage the Science Working Group and reviews the Project’s education and public outreach efforts, including this website! In 2006 he wrote an article on the scientific objectives and design of the observatory for the journal Space Science Reviews.

As Chief of the Cosmology Lab, Gardner works with scientists who study the universe as a whole, through observations of the cosmic microwave background as well as observations of individual galaxies. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), launched in 2001, has established that the universe has an overall flat geometry, determined the balance of ordinary matter, dark matter and the mysterious dark energy, and has found the first evidence consistent with the theory of inflation, in which the universe went through an intense period of highly accelerated expansion very early in its history. Gardner’s lab is studying – and helping to build – future missions that will investigate dark energy and inflation.

Gardner enjoys public speaking, and often gives presentations about JWST and cosmology at museums, universities and conferences and most recently at the International Year of Astronomy opening ceremonies at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

Gardner enjoys music and is very involved in the community. Gardner plays the guitar, and together with his wife performs in a group called Transatlantic Crossing, playing folk music from both sides of the Atlantic, including England, Scotland, Ireland and the United States. He is also interested in education and serves as the Chair of the Greenbelt City’s Advisory Committee on Education (ACE).

Official Bio

Dr. William P. Roach, a member of the Scientific and Professional Cadre of Senior Executives, is Chief Scientist, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Arlington, Virginia. Dr. Roach is the principal science and technology adviser to the Director in matters of formulation, planning, managing and integration of all Air Force basic research programs. The office has a staff of approximately 200 people and an annual working budget of nearly $500 million that supports more than 5,000 worldwide basic research projects critical to the defense of the U.S. The office selects, sponsors and manages research relevant to Air and Space Force needs in science and technology, and is the single manager for the entire Air and Space Force basic research programs.

Dr. Roach began his career as an enlisted member of the United States Air Force in 1971, serving with the 23rd Tactical Fighter Wing, the 388th TFW, the 90th Strategic Missile Wing and the 442nd TFW. He received a direct commission to the rank of captain in 1990 after receiving his Ph.D. in Physics and assigned to the United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, Optical Radiation Bioeffects Division, Brooks Air Force Base, Texas. Upon retirement from active duty with the Air Force in 2005, Dr. Roach joined the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Human Effectiveness Directorate, Special Operations and Projects Division as a Senior Research Physicist.

Academically, Dr. Roach has served as Professor of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences from 1996 to 2001; Adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of Texas, San Antonio in 2010; Adjunct Associate Professor of Physics at Delaware State University from 2017 to 2018; and Research Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering from 2017 to 2019. Dr. Roach has authored and co-authored more than 175 refereed and non-refereed journal and proceedings articles, more than 1,000 conference presentations, technical reports, conference publications, and has also edited two books. Google Scholar lists Professor William Roach as achieving 2,464 citations, an h-index of 26 and an i10-index of 48.

Official Bio