Professor Ward has developed technical course curricula and teaching/training materials in various subjects for most of his career with 22 of those years as a program administrator and professor in charge of managing technical programs' recruitment, retention and placement. He is very adept and comfortable with funding discussions, documentation, online communication tools and online data transfer having dealt with projects that span the entire country with thousands of stakeholders consisting of collegiate, industry and academic trainers, researchers and the federal government.
Professor Ward holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Technical Graphics from Purdue University and a Master of Science in Space Studies with a minor in Aerospace Science. He has have been a post-secondary educator for most of his 30-year career-11 years of those as a lecturer at Purdue University teaching CAD and laboratory courses in Engineering Technology, Mechanical Engineering Technology and Computer Graphics Technology. Every summer for the last 27 years, he has been working in technical environments as a government contract employee or faculty researcher with NASA and in various private industries. He is very skilled at understanding, adapting to and operating in different, and sometimes difficult, research and production environments.
Professor Ward's most recent position before coming back to Purdue was with NASA as an Education Specialist II with a Public Trust Clearance at NASA-Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio under the Aerospace Academy program developing the designs, hardware, software, and final products utilized by the program supporting the Simulated Lunar OPErations (SLOPE) Laboratory, Power Management Directorate, Materials, Acoustics and Icing Research branches. In this position, he acted as the Technical Project Lead on the NASA side with our university partners, which made him the primary contact for the university grant sites all over the country. His last project, focused on the one-of-a-kind Icing Research Tunnel located at NASA-Glenn and its design and safety contributions to nearly every commercial and military aircraft flying today. The final icing project dealt with the strut/wing connection of the recently “paused” Boeing X-66 Transonic Truss-Braced Wing aircraft and the development of computer models for use in the newly-released GlennICE software. Professor Ward is still consulting with the tunnel during their drawdown and subsequently reinvented priorities. We anticipate continuing work on a project where Purdue will become the partner institution.
In 1998, Professor Ward was selected to serve as a NASA Faculty Research Fellow with Dryden (now Armstrong) Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California where he worked on projects including the F-18 Active Aeroelastic Wing and the Helios Imaging Project. He also produced two interactive educational products for the center: the Aerospace Educators Resource Guide and Test Flying Newton's Laws. The NASA Aerospace Technology Education Resource Guide was produced with financial support from the Centennial of Flight Foundation and had a circulation of 100,000 copies. Flight Testing Newton's Laws was designed to explain the four forces of flight: lift, weight, thrust, and drag to teach the principles of flight dynamics and Newtonian physics. This product did quite well and is still in circulation online. During his time working for NASA-Armstrong, he was fortunate to work on and around projects such as the X-33, X-34, X-38 and the end of the SR-71 and Space Shuttle programs. He also worked virtually with Lockheed Martin and NASA during the pandemic on the X-59 QueSST Low-Boom Demonstrator that has recently taken its first flight. While working on the virtual model of the aircraft in 2020, he completed a project comparing theoretical computational fluid dynamics models provided by project partners at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, to actual wind tunnel data generated in the tunnels at NASA-Glenn. H served with NASA-Armstrong as a faculty fellow until February 2023 when he accepted his position at NASA-Glenn.
As part of his research-guided NASA experience, he devised and mentored a research project with four students in the Microgravity Flight Program at NASA-Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas in 2011 and 2012 where they worked on the design, development and testing of long-duration spaceflight technologies flying experiments in zero-g test aircraft. Professor Ward discovered that one of the challenges of being a mentor is that he must not only provide guidance and encouragement but the show wisdom of how to dispense it so that it elevates the students and their confidence in themselves and their skills and knowledge. This was never more evident than when the students defended the project during the engineering design and safety review (they volunteered to go first) in front of ten NASA engineers, the flight crew and the other 60 student researchers to get cleared for our flight while he stood quietly in the back of the room. They aced the review, and they went flying.
Professor Ward is a twice-published author for NASA in the areas of digital imaging and 3-D printing and continue his research projects to this day as part of his new mission at Purdue. In 2020 he finished working with NASA-Armstrong Flight Research Center as a technical editor on their premier history publication Flights of Discovery-75 Years of Flight Research at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Center. Unfortunately, pandemic era budget cuts prevented the book from going into physical publication.
He worked with Purdue Computer Graphics Technology capstone students in 2020/2021 as a mentor/advisor and NASA-Armstrong content expert developing an interactive e-pub version of the Flights of Discovery book also to be released on the NASA website. This project produced two placements within NASA, and each of the participants received an official commendation from NASA recognizing for the outstanding and diligent work on the project during the most difficult school year in Purdue's history. Mentoring students to success, whether that means completing a course, a diploma, graduate school or employment, is an exercise in mutual trust and reciprocity. Professor Ward is invested in their success as it is part of his success. Other projects he has worked on as a NASA representative with Purdue students include: Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the National Airspace System Project and the Flight Testing Newton's Laws reboot among others. In 2021, he received a commendation from NASA for my project work as a Purdue Capstone mentor.
In 2020 with the cooperation and approval of NASA and Purdue University, I co-authored a Space Act Agreement with NASA-Armstrong, which is active until 2030, to streamline communications and more easily enable Purdue students and researchers to work on real-world projects with NASA Outreach, provide NASA mentors and research professionals for student research projects, and create products for outreach use and properly apply NASA graphics standards and communication policies.
