The longtime Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering faculty member and associate school chair is the director of Tech's High Power Electric Propulsion Lab.

"Having a thought leader of Dr. Walker's caliber on this committee will not only benefit NASA's mission, it will accelerate and improve the research that's being conducted by NASA collaborators everywhere," said William R. T. Oakes Professor & School Chair Mark F. Costello.

The Technology, Innovation and Engineering Committee is a standing committee of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) supporting the advisory needs of the NASA administrator, the Office of the Chief Technologist, and NASA Mission Directorates. The scope of the Committee includes all NASA programs that could benefit from technology research and innovation.

"It's a really exciting time to be serving NASA by evaluating new technologies and innovations for future initiatives," said Walker. "I look forward to collaborating with this group."

Walker's primary research interests lie in electric propulsion, plasma physics, and hypersonic aerodynamics/ plasma interaction. He has extensive design and testing experience with Hall thrusters and ion engines and has performed seminal work in Hall thruster clustering, vacuum chamber facility effects, plasma-material interactions, and electron emission from carbon nanotubes. His current research activities involve both theoretical and experimental work in advanced spacecraft propulsion systems, diagnostics (including THz time-domain spectroscopy and Thomson scattering), plasma physics, helicon plasma sources, magneto-plasmadynamic thrusters, and pulsed inductive thrusters.