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Dr. W. Lance Richards

NESC Chief Engineer at AFRC

Dr. W. Lance Richards was selected in March 2014 as the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) Chief Engineer at the Armstrong Flight Research Center (AFRC).  

Dr. Richards joined NASA Armstrong (then Dryden) Flight Research Center in 1985 as an aerospace engineer in the Flight Loads Laboratory, conducting research in hot structures technology and high temperature instrumentation.

From 1995 until 2009, Dr. Richards led Armstrong’s research and development efforts in fiber optic sensing, structural health monitoring (SHM), and nondestructive evaluation (NDE) technology in support of numerous aerospace vehicle programs across the agency.  Dr. Richards served as technical leader of the Advanced Structures and Measurement Technologies (ASMT) Group, with the charter to advance the state-of-the-art in advanced sensors and instrumentation for large-scale flight structures, for both aeronautics (subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic flight regimes) and space-related applications.

Dr. Richards conducted research in fiber-optic smart structures and served as Principal Investigator of structural health monitoring flight experiments in support of 2nd and 3rd Generation Launch Vehicle programs, X-33 / F-18 SHM Risk Reduction Testing, and Fiber Optic Wing Shape Sensing on NASA’s Ikhana/Predator-B UAV.

Dr. Richards currently serves as Associate Editor for the International Journal of Structural Health Monitoring and is an active member of ASME’s Technical Committees for Smart Structures and Materials and Structural Health Monitoring.

In 2013, Dr. Richards and the Armstrong team were awarded the R&D 100 Award for Fiber Optics Sensing Technology and the Federal Laboratory Consortium “Outstanding Commercial Success” Award.

Dr. Richards has authored over 100 technical reports and publications and has received 7 US patents. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico and his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wales Swansea, UK.