Five Johns Hopkins APL Staff Members Named AIAA Associate Fellows

Adams is the flight system engineer on Dragonfly, an APL-led NASA mission that will send a rotorcraft lander to explore the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. Before joining APL, he spent 12 years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

He has worked on more than 10 robotic spacecraft and supported the development of the InSight lander and the Mars 2020 rover, Perseverance. He has also helped formulate numerous spacecraft concepts that span the solar system. Adams has played an important role in the entry, descent and landing community throughout his career and has authored more than 50 papers and presented at numerous conferences.

Likar has held leadership roles for various civilian space, national security space and Department of Defense programs, focusing his efforts on component design and tests associated with radiation exposure and spacecraft survivability. He currently serves as the radiation, survivability and spacecraft charging lead for the Europa Clipper orbiter scheduled to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa.

Before his arrival at APL in 2018, Likar led research and development efforts associated with the space environment, radiation effects and plasma interactions for next-generation spacecraft, and he served as the principal investigator for an International Space Station payload while at Lockheed Martin Space Systems. While at UTC Aerospace Systems, he managed and coordinated radiation-hardness assurance design and testing, along with outside suppliers and test facilities, for multiple programs and program offices.

As the head of APL’s Space Exploration Sector, Ryschkewitsch led the sector to its first large mission competitive wins in a number of years with Dragonfly (NASA New Frontiers program) and Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (NASA Solar Terrestrial Probes program), as well core science instruments for the Europa Clipper mission. At the same time, the SES team delivered Parker Solar Probe on schedule and on cost.

Before joining APL, Ryschkewitsch served as NASA’s chief engineer from 2007 through 2013, led the engineering workforce fly out of the space shuttle, and oversaw the beginnings of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, an initiative to work with the American aerospace industry to develop and operate a new generation of spacecraft and launch systems capable of carrying crews to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station. He led initiatives to update and streamline agency programs, significantly increase funding for technology development and form the Office of the Chief Technologist and the Space Technology Mission Directorate. He also secured additional investments to fund basic engineering research and work in advanced methods to improve engineering practices.

Wheaton is an aerospace engineer specializing in hypersonic aerothermodynamics and fluid dynamics, focusing especially on hypersonic boundary-layer transition prediction and its effects on hypersonic vehicles. He joined APL in 2013 and quickly became a nationally recognized contributor in hypersonics by developing test campaigns and modeling aerodynamic heating and transition phenomena. He designed and oversaw numerous hypersonic wind tunnel experiments to gather critical data needed for predicting boundary-layer transition on hypersonic geometries. He has championed the advancement of transition prediction tools as principal investigator of several internal research projects at APL and as task lead for sponsored work.

Since 2017, Wheaton has served as the principal investigator of the Boundary Layer Transition flight experiment (or BOLT), a centerpiece of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research high-speed aerodynamics portfolio, and leads an international team of nine organizations across government, academia and industry to design and conduct a hypersonic flight test experiment. He also serves as a group chief scientist, overseeing initiatives such as collaboration with academia and a workforce development program focused on doctoral student researchers.

Zuber leads diverse teams studying the structure of a hypersonic weapons attack, the protection of high-value airborne assets and the application of new and innovative technologies. He develops and mentors technical leaders and facilitates critical contributions in hypersonics, manned and unmanned teaming and the air dominance domain.

Before joining APL in 2017, Zuber served for 25 years as an Air Force officer, with noteworthy contributions as a technical leader and aerospace technology developer and researcher. In the 1990s, he was the flight test lead for the Global Positioning System integration with the A-10 Warthog aircraft. As mission director, he conducted a successful qualification test and evaluation of the integrated system, a highly technical endeavor involving more than 100 test sorties. His subsequent assignment involved the Airborne Laser Test Bed, a megawatt-class, high-energy laser integrated into a Boeing 747. He spent five years as director of engineering for that program, which culminated in the successful integration and testing of the $2 billion test aircraft.