People Category: Thursday SciTech Sessions

Mary Lynne Dittmar

Dr. Mary Lynne Dittmar is President and CEO of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, an industry trade group supporting human exploration, science, commerce, and American leadership in space. Under her leadership the Coalition has grown from 5 companies to more than 70 over the past four years and is a recognized source for policy, technical and business information in the aerospace and defense sector.

Earlier in her career Dr. Dittmar managed the mission operations group for
The Boeing Company on the International Space Station Program. Later,
she acted as a special advisor to the NASA Astronaut Office before her
appointment as Boeing Chief Scientist for Commercial Utilization of the
ISS. More recently she was Senior Policy Advisor to International Space
Station National Laboratory. She has also served as a senior advisor to
NASA, the DoD, and the FAA.

Mary Lynne is a Fellow of the National Research Society and an Associate
Fellow of the American Institute for Astronautics and Aeronautics. From 2012-2014 she served as a member of the National Research Council Committee on Human Spaceflight, and is beginning her third term as a member of the Executive Committee of the Space Studies Board of the National Academies. She is also a member of the Users’ Advisory Group of the National Space Council and of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee for the FAA. Dr. Dittmar resides in Washington, D.C.

Tom Shih

Tom I-P. Shih is the J. William Uhrig and Anastasia Vournas Head and Professor of the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University.  Before coming to Purdue, he was Professor and Chair of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Iowa State University.  He has also served as a faculty member at Michigan State University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Florida and was a mechanical engineer at NASA Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center.  Shih started his undergraduate education at West Virginia University, but completed his BS degree at the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. His MS and PhD degrees are from The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  His research interests are in computational fluid mechanics, gas turbine aerodynamics and heat transfer, aircraft icing, and control of shock-wave/boundary-layer interactions.  He is a fellow of AIAA and ASME and a recipient of AIAA’s Energy Systems Award. Currently, he serves on the NASA Advisory Council – Aeronautics Committee and a number of other advisory boards and chairs AIAA Committee on Higher Education.