Workshop

2016 Summer Workshop

The 2016 summer workshop helped build relationships among Hertz Fellows and colleagues at all stages of their careers.

Date:
Jul 7, 2016 - Jul 10, 2016
Location:
Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacific Grove, CA
Materials:

Distinguished Speakers

Kevin G. Bowcutt
Senior Technical Fellow & Chief Scientist for Hypersonic, The Boeing Company

Dr. Kevin G. Bowcutt is a Boeing Senior Technical Fellow and Chief Scientist of Hypersonics for The Boeing Company, with 32 years of experience. He is an AIAA Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He holds BS, MS and PhD degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland. Dr. Bowcutt is an internationally recognized expert in hypersonic aerodynamics, propulsion integration, and vehicle design and optimization. Notable accomplishments include developing the modern viscous-optimized hypersonic waverider; serving in technical leadership roles on the National AeroSpace Plane program; leading a project to flight test scramjet engines by launching them from a light gas gun; originating the concept and optimizing the design of the USAF/DARPA X-51A scramjet-powered waverider vehicle; leading a team that designed an air-breathing reusable launch vehicle concept; and working on the Space Shuttle Columbia accident investigation simulating wing aero-thermal-structural failure. In the spring semester of 2007 Dr. Bowcutt was a visiting professor at Princeton University’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department where he taught a course in hypersonic aircraft design. Dr. Bowcutt currently leads Boeing’s efforts to develop and apply multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization (MDAO) methods to hypersonic vehicles; leads Boeing’s participation in the international HIFiRE hypersonic flight test program; and is leading the design of several advanced hypersonic vehicle concepts.


James E. Brau, Hertz Fellow
Knight Professor of Natural Science, University of Oregon (UO)
Director for UO Center for High Energy Physics

Jim Brau is Philip H. Knight Professor of Natural Science at the University of Oregon, Director of the University of Oregon Center for High Energy Physics, and a faculty member of the Oregon Physics Department.

Brau is a 1969 Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he majored in both physics and mathematics. He resigned his Air Force commission as a captain in 1974.  His Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship supported his graduate school training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was graduated in January 1978, with a Ph.D. in physics based on his dissertation work with high energy hadronic interaction data collected at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.  He worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from 1978-1982 as a research associate studying anti-proton annihilation and high energy photoproduction, until he moved to a faculty position at the University of Tennessee.  In 1988, Brau joined the Oregon physics faculty and formed the first experimental particle physics group at Oregon.  He led his group into the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration in 1997 and co-authored the 2016 gravitational wave discovery paper. He was also a co-author of the ATLAS Higgs boson discovery paper in 2012.  He has been a leader in the worldwide collaboration to realize the International Linear Collider.

Brau is a 2011 recipient of the University of Oregon Research Innovation Award, a current member of the Linear Collider Collaboration Physics and Detector Executive Board, a past member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration Executive Committee, a past co-chair of the Worldwide Study for Future Linear Electron-positron Colliders, and a past member of numerous national and international advisory committees (including the Department of Energy/National Science Foundation High Energy Physics Advisory Committee, the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Board on Physics and Astronomy, and the DESY (Germany) Physics Research Committee).  He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellow.


Michael Snyder
Stanford Ascherman Professor and Chair of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine

Michael Snyder is the Stanford Ascherman Professor and Chair of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Dr. Snyder received his Ph.D. training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and proteomics, and one of the major participants of the ENCODE project. His laboratory study was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism, and has developed many technologies in genomics and proteomics. These including the development of proteome chips, high resolution tiling arrays for the entire human genome, methods for global mapping of transcription factor binding sites (ChIP-chip now replaced by ChIP-seq), paired end sequencing for mapping of structural variation in eukaryotes, de novo genome sequencing of genomes using high throughput technologies and RNA-Seq. These technologies have been used for characterizing genomes, proteomes and regulatory networks. Seminal findings from the Snyder laboratory include the discovery that much more of the human genome is transcribed and contains regulatory information than was previously appreciated, and a high diversity of transcription factor binding occurs both between and within species. He has also combined different state-of–the-art “omics” technologies to perform the first longitudinal detailed integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) of person and used this to assess disease risk and monitor disease states for personalized medicine. He is a cofounder of several biotechnology companies, including Protometrix (now part of Life Technologies), Affomix (now part of Illumina), Excelix, and Personalis, and he presently serves on the board of a number of companies.


Dr. Marianne C. Walck
California Laboratory & Energy and Climate
Sandia National Laboratories

Dr. Marianne C. Walck is vice president of Sandia’s California laboratory and serves as lead for the Laboratories’ Energy and Climate business unit. The California laboratory’s principal programs include nuclear weapons stewardship; homeland security with a focus on defending against weapons of mass destruction; combustion, transportation and hydrogen energy research; biology; and advanced computational and information systems. Dr. Walck is also the Associate Director for the Center for Frontiers of Energy Security, a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center.

Prior to moving to Sandia’s California laboratory, Dr. Walck was the Director of the Geoscience, Climate, and Consequence Effects Center. She served on the Sandia Research Leadership Team, led the Geoscience Research Foundation, and was the Program Director for Sandia’s Climate Security Program. Dr. Walck has more than 24 years of technical management experience. Previous roles have included Director of the Nuclear Energy and Global Security Technologies Center at Sandia, Senior Manager for the Nuclear Energy Safety Technologies Group, and Manager of the Geophysics Department.

Dr. Walck earned her Ph.D. in geophysics (seismology) from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1984; an M.S. in geophysics, also from Caltech in 1981; and an A.B. in geology/physics from Hope College (Holland, Michigan) in 1978. She is author of more than 60 technical papers and published presentations. She holds memberships in the American Geophysical Union, the Seismological Society of America, the Association for Women Geoscientists, and the American Nuclear Society. Dr. Walck has served on numerous professional committees for national laboratories and professional societies. She is a member of the Advisory Council for the College of Geosciences at Texas A&M University. She volunteers at Sandia Labs as a mentor, in the Albuquerque community with the Regional Science Fair, and as a violinist in a community orchestra.