Timothy K. Risch – NESC Academy Biography

Tim has over 30 years of aerospace technical and managerial experience spanning the subsonic and hypersonic flight regimes.  After graduating with Bachelors and Masters Degrees from the University of California in Chemical Engineering, Tim worked at the Aerotherm Corporation for 17 years performing hypersonic flight and thermal analysis. His work also included high-temperature instrumentation development, high-energy laser development, thermal protection system design, and non-equilibrium analysis of high-temperature internal and external flows. From 1993 to 2001 he served as the Chief Design Engineer for the Scirocco Wind Tunnel project in Capua Italy. His responsibilities included developing engineering requirements for the main system components, utilities, and the overall facility performance. At 70 MW, Scirocco is the world’s largest arc jet wind tunnel. After several years working for a semiconductor equipment manufacturer and then 3 years with a contractor at the NASA Ames Research Center, Tim came to the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center (AFRC) as a civil servant in 2007. In addition to serving as AFRC’s Hypersonic Project Deputy Program Manager, he also served s as the Project Manager for the X-48 flight test project, and is now the Deputy Branch Chief for the Aerostructures Branch.