People Category: Thursday SciTech Sessions

Dr. Paula Bontempi has been a biological oceanographer for 25 years. She began her career as a research intern at the New England Aquarium as an undergraduate at Boston College, later entering the fields of phytoplankton taxonomy and physiology in the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University. Research on phytoplankton taxa and coupled physical and biological drivers of global and regional phytoplankton spatial patterns led to interests in marine bio-optics and ocean color remote sensing. She graduated from the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography in 2001 with a Ph.D., spending time during her studies as a research fellow at the SACLANT Lab in La Spezia, Italy, in Friday Harbor, Washington, and as a summer intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She moved from the faculty at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Department of Marine Science to NASA Headquarters in 2003. Dr. Bontempi spent over 16 years as the program manager for Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry at NASA Headquarters, as well as the Lead for NASA’s Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Focus Area and the agency’s Carbon Cycle Science research lead, before becoming the Earth Science Division’s Acting Deputy Director in 2019. She is Program Scientist for MODIS-Terra and Aqua, Suomi NPP, PACE, NAAMES (EV-S), HICO, CORAL (EV-S), and the former SeaWiFS mission. She has been honored to be invited to teach the Earth Science module of NASA’s astronaut training class over the last several years.

Jim Anderson is the Philip S. Weld Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Earth and Planetary Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University. He was Chairman, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 1998–2001. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992, the American Philosophical Society in 1998, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1986, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 1989.

He received the 2019 Aluminus Summa Laude Dignatus from the University of Washington, the 2017 Lichtenberg Medal from the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the 2016 Polanyi Medal of the British Royal Academy of Chemistry for work on free radical kinetics, the 2016 Benton Medal for Public Service by the University of Chicago, and the 2012 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in the Physical Sciences. He received the E.O. Lawrence Award in Environmental Science and Technology; the American Chemical Society’s Gustavus John Esselen Award for Chemistry in the Public Interest; the United Nations Vienna Convention Award for Protection of the Ozone Layer; Harvard University’s Ledlie Prize for Most Valuable Contribution to Science by a Member of the Faculty; the American Chemical Society’s National Award for Creative Advances in Environmental Science and Technology. He has testified on numerous occasions before both Senate and House committees on national energy and climate issues.

The Anderson research group addresses four domains at the intersection of the physical sciences with global climate change: (1) chemical catalysis sustained by free radical chain reactions that dictate the macroscopic rate of chemical transformation in Earth’s stratosphere and troposphere; (2) mechanistic links between chemistry, radiation, and dynamics in the atmosphere that control climate; (3) the design and development of new climate observing systems including solar powered stratospheric aircraft and the StratoCruiser Flight System; and (4) chemical reactivity viewed from the microscopic perspective of electron structure, molecular orbitals and reactivities of radical-radical and radical-molecule systems.

Dr. Michael Francis is an aerospace executive and technologist with over 45 years of experience in architecting and leading cutting edge research and technology programs spanning government, industry and academia. He currently serves as an independent consultant in aerospace and related advanced technology subjects.

Francis is perhaps best known for his pioneering work in unmanned air systems development, having initiated the original Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) and Micro Air Vehicle programs while serving at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the early-90s. Then Colonel Francis also directed the award-winning US-German X-31 Enhanced Fighter Maneuverability Program through its flight test phase during the same timeframe. He later returned to the Department of Defense (DOD) as the Director for the $4B DARPA-Air Force-Navy Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS) Program, the successor to UCAV and the largest unmanned air system development to that point in time.

Dr. Francis began his professional career as an officer in the US Air Force. Many of his military assignments were centered on research and development, including his first at the U.S. Air Force Academy as a research scientist and professor. He later served as a program manager for advanced fluid mechanics and aerodynamics research at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, establishing the Air Force’s first initiatives in flow control. Following graduation from the Defense Systems Management College, he went on to manage advanced space system development efforts at what is now the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center. These included satellite programs for the Strategic Defense Initiative, and later classified space system development efforts. In his last military assignment as the chief architect of the Pentagon’s Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO), Francis led the development of the DOD’s first integrated air and space surveillance architecture in collaboration with the National Reconnaissance Office.

Following his military retirement in 1997, Francis joined unmanned aircraft industry pioneer Aurora Flight Sciences, where he co-founded and served as the first president of Athena Technologies, a start-up control technology company subsequently acquired by Rockwell Collins. He later held executive and leadership roles in the aerospace industry, serving as an executive with both Lockheed Martin and General Atomics. Francis recently served as the Chief, Advanced Programs and Senior Fellow at the United Technologies Research Center (UTRC), where he created and led its initiative to develop Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. From 2011 until 2015, he also served in the dual role of Program Executive, Optionally Piloted and Autonomous Systems at Sikorsky Aircraft. He guided Sikorsky’s Autonomy R&D program that ultimately led to the MATRIXTM autonomous technology suite and Sikorsky’s Autonomy Research Aircraft (SARA). Francis also helped shape UTRC’s initiative in intelligent robotics and led other projects, including aircraft propulsion-enabled control until he retired in December 2017.

Dr. Francis holds B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Aerospace Engineering Sciences from the University of Colorado. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). He has served on several major university engineering advisory boards, and currently serves on the NASA Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. He has authored or co-authored more than 40 open literature publications. Francis became a licensed private pilot in 1964.

Francis’ major awards include the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Wright Brothers Lectureship; Smithsonian Air & Space Museum Trophy (in 1995, for X-31); the German Aerospace Society (DGLR) “Ehrennadel der Deutschen Luftfahrt” Medal; Honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Colorado; the AIAA Distinguished Service Award; the AIAA Hap Arnold Award for Aeronautical Program Management; the Israel Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Von Karman Memorial Lectureship; an Aviation Week & Space Technology Aerospace Laurels Award, and numerous military awards and decorations. In 2016, he was elected to the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.

Dr. Francis resides in Solana Beach, California with his wife, Barbara.

Dr. Scott A. Morton manages the Air Vehicles component of the U.S. DoD HPCMP Computational Research Engineering Acquisition Tools and Environments (CREATE) Program. The project, CREATE-AV, produces a suite of three major products, ADAPT, an aircraft design and optimization tool, Helios, a helicopter virtual aircraft simulation tool, and Kestrel, a fixed wing virtual aircraft tool, delivering capabilities to the U.S. Defense Aerospace Industry in response to prioritized needs of the U.S. Armed Services. These products are architected to exploit current and future High Performance Computing (HPC) systems to enable use of multi-disciplinary, physics-based simulation software to generate actionable engineering data in support of Defense Acquisition. Dr. Morton has specialized in the areas of high angle of attack aerodynamics, aeroelasticity, and computational stability and control in his 34+ year career developing DoD software. He is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS), and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

Eric Nielsen is a Senior Research Scientist with the Computational AeroSciences Branch at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

He received his PhD in Aerospace Engineering from Virginia Tech and has worked at Langley for the past 25 years. Dr. Nielsen specializes in the development of computational aerodynamics software for the world’s most powerful computer systems. The software has been distributed to thousands of organizations around the country and supports major national research and engineering efforts at NASA, in industry, academia, the Department of Defense, and other government agencies. He has published extensively on the subject and has given presentations around the world on his work. Dr. Nielsen is a recipient of NASA’s Exceptional Achievement and Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medals as well as NASA Langley’s HJE Reid Award for best research publication.

Douglas B. Kothe (Doug) has over three decades of experience in conducting and leading applied R&D in computational applications designed to simulate complex physical phenomena in the energy, defense, and manufacturing sectors. Doug is currently the Deputy Associate Laboratory Director of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate (CCSD) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Prior positions for Doug at ORNL, where he has been since 2006, were Director of the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, DOE’s first Energy Innovation Hub (2010-2015), and Director of Science at the National Center for Computational Sciences (2006-2010).

Before coming to ORNL, Doug spent 20 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he held a number of technical and line and program management positions, with a common theme being the development and application of modeling and simulation technologies targeting multi-physics phenomena characterized in part by the presence of compressible or incompressible interfacial fluid flow. Doug also spent one year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the late 1980s as a physicist in defense sciences.

Doug holds a Bachelor in Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Missouri – Columbia (1983) and a Masters in Science (1986) and Doctor of Philosophy (1987) in Nuclear Engineering from Purdue University.