Guest Speaker Series

Every spring and fall semester, the AE School invites top aerospace engineering experts from across the world to host a seminar focused on an aerospace engineering topic of their choosing. Topics can range from spacecraft technologies to advanced aircraft concepts, and everything in between. These seminars are open to the Georgia Tech community and offer a variety of topics that attract many of our students, faculty, and research engineers. 

Please contact the AE faculty seminar coordinator if you have any questions or would like to be considered a guest speaker. 

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Faculty Seminar Coordinator

Cristina Riso
Assistant Professor
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Eric Gebhardt Distinguished Lecture Series

The Gebhardt Lecture Series was established to recognize leading experts worldwide who will share their prospects and visions on how to shape aerospace education and research in the future. The primary audience will be aerospace engineering faculty and graduate students in the AE School who work within and across a wide range of disciplinary areas including structures, controls, propulsion, fluid dynamics, design, and systems engineering.

Fran and Eric Gebhardt, AE '90, made a commitment to the School of Aerospace Engineering to support the series. Eric Gebhardt is currently the GE Energy Vice President Thermal Engineering and Chief Technology Officer of the General Electric Company.

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Eric Gebhardt
Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Wabtec Corporation

Past Presentations

The Space Shuttle and I

Robert L. Crippen

The Space Shuttle consumed a major portion of my life, nearly thirty years. I was there at the beginning when we were defining crew requirements. That included the computer requirements, cockpit controls and displays, and procedure development Flying the Shuttle was a rewarding experience after years of being involved in the development.

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What does the future bring? A look at Technologies for Commercial Aircraft in the years 2035 to 2050

Meyer Benzakein

Demographics and economics in the next 20 years are being examined. They reflect a significant GDP growth and with this a strong demand for commercial aircraft not only in the US and Europe but across Asia and the Middle East.

Inventing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

Paul Bevilaqua

During the first century of flight, the focus of aerospace education has been on the methods of predicting lift and drag, with cost and schedule as dependent variables. Consequently, our engineers are very good at predicting 

Why Do We Want to Have a Space Program?

Michael Griffin

For more than fifty years, the exploration and development of space by the United States could have been characterized, without much exaggeration, as “all government, all the time”.