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Faculty from WSE attended the second of two retreats on Monday, Jan. 23, at the APL campus in Laurel, as part of a networking effort to increase partnerships between the school and JHU APL. The day’s agenda involved a sharing of research and educational opportunities between WSE and APL for students and faculty.

“The opportunity to collaborate with the APL is an opportunity that we should take full advantage of,” said Ed Schlesinger, Dean of WSE. “We’ve worked very hard to make it very easy to work together on projects of mutual interest.”

Leaders from the WSE presented on the Engineering Professionals and the Electrical and Computer Engineering programs. APL provided an overview and history of the organization, as well as a more in-depth look at the APL Research and Exploratory Development Department (REDD). The department showcased several innovative projects they are working on including robotic prosthetic arms controlled by thought.

Ralph Semmel, APL director, shared a timeline of historic milestones the organization participated in since APL was first established in 1942, including the first photos taken in space, warfare analysis, advanced prosthetics, and most recently – a mission to Pluto. Semmel shared photos of the terrain on Pluto which depicted mountainous regions as high as the Rockies.

In addition to the full agenda of speakers, a poster session was held during lunchtime, and throughout the afternoon. Tours of three APL facilities were provided including the Intelligent Systems Center, Advanced Materials lab, and micro-electronics.

APL will celebrate its 75th anniversary this year in March.

In late October, Whiting School students, faculty, faculty members, and research staff members from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory gathered in the Homewood campus’ Glass Pavilion to view a poster session and listen to talks about APL research projects in areas that included computer vision, prosthetic limbs, and secure mobile communications. The presenters that afternoon were not APL scientists and engineers; they were students who had worked as paid undergraduate interns at APL last summer.

These internships, known now as RISE (Research Internships in Science and Engineering), are part of our recently expanded partnerships to support and broaden WSE’s relationship with APL. Working with APL Director Ralph Semmel, we are building new research and academic programs, internships, and residential research and exchange opportunities between our two campuses for our students, postdocs, and faculty members, as well as for researchers at both institutions.

This new effort, SPUR@APL (Strategic Partnership for University Research), incorporates a variety of initiatives that complement ongoing academic programs, in which APL staff members teach in our part-time and online engineering master’s programs. These new initiatives include: a Summer Faculty Fellows program that allows our faculty members to spend up to three summer months working at APL, a Graduate Fellows program that offers resident masters and pre-doctoral fellowships for JHU graduates, and a number of other undergraduate and graduate internship and research opportunities.

Strengthening and broadening our connections across the Johns Hopkins divisions enables us to attract and retain the creative, collaborative, and visionary students and faculty members who appreciate the resources and access to expertise these opportunities afford. These connections also will accelerate research innovation and translation and the impact we have on the world.

As we continue to strengthen our ties with APL, we also are deepening our academic and research connections with other Johns Hopkins divisions, including with the School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, through initiatives such as the recent formation of the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering (see p. 2).

As members of our community, I hope you share my pride in the Whiting School’s integral role in advancing the mission of all of the Johns Hopkins divisions.

Sincerely,

Ed Schlesinger

Benjamin T. Rome Dean

The JHU WSE Energetics Research Group and Commercial and Government Program Office (CGPO) recently completed a project from the National Defense University (NDU) in support of the U.S. Air Force’s Air University, to study the how the commercial space industry can be leveraged to support national needs for access to space, as well as effects and risks that increased access may pose for U.S. national security.

JHU conducted the $1.4 Million study in partnership with three prominent Washington D.C.-based think tanks: The Center for a New American Security, the Telemus Group, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

As countries around the globe compete for access to space, new threats are continuously emerging for our nation. These new threats coupled with a strained federal budget mandate a need for more affordable space travel and access. To this end, the goal is to develop and employ fully-reusable launch vehicles. The Hopkins and NDU team studied whether it is feasible and economical to support commercially-led public and private partnerships to develop new technology that will allow cheaper and faster access to space; the risks and benefits of doing so; and what changes to policies and regulations would enable these new commercially designed and built vehicles and systems.

This project was awarded under WSE Commercial and Government Program Office, a new office within the WSE designed to build partnerships between government, industry and the university. The work was conducted and managed by the Energetics Research Group. Additional partners included Wikistrat, a consulting company focusing on crowdsourcing; and BMNT Partners, which operates under the Hacking for Defense platform at Stanford University. JHU small business partners also played key roles in the study, including: Onyx Aerospace (Athens, AL); Interstellar Technologies LLC (Huntsville, AL); and Special Aerospace Services (Boulder, CO).

JANNAF Member Jeff Thornburg, founder of the engineering technology development company, Interstellar, LLC, spoke about ways in which government and industry can work together to fast track innovation in space exploration at the Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering on Sept. 21.

Thornburg spent much of his time discussing his experience working at SpaceX and seeing how quickly progress and development moved during his time serving as Vice President of Propulsion Engineering there.

“Don’t believe anything anybody tells you about schedules and budgets. It’s really about progress and development,” Thornburg said. “You have to push the paradigms. In development you have to push as far as you can get away with and it should be ok to do that.”

Showing videos of several successful launches at SpaceX, Thornburg talked about how hard all the employees worked to make the launches a success. “Every launch is a single emotional event. It’s like birthing a baby every launch, every single time,” he stated of the enthusiasm seen by the staff at SpaceX in the videos.

He shared an anecdote about his first phone call with SpaceX founder Elon Musk who was interested in working with him in 2011. Not knowing who Elon Musk was at the time, Thornburg told Musk’s assistant that he would have to call him back after he gave his daughter a bath and put her to bed. Thornburg ended up taking the job at SpaceX and staying for five years before leaving to start his own company, Interstellar, LLC. Prior to SpaceX, Thornburg worked in both government and industry, giving him insight into how the two realms interact with each other in space exploration.

Thornburg stated that he would like to see more collaboration between government and industry and the need for fast tracking innovation.

“The sky is the limit,” he said. “I want to see us move faster because I want to see the cool stuff happen before I’m 80.”

Thornburg’s speech was the first in a planned series of speeches by members of the community focusing on space research. The speaker series is sponsored by the Commercial and Government Program Office at Johns Hopkins University. All are welcome to attend.