COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- Dr. Paul Cizmas, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University, has been appointed to an aerospace propulsion committee of the National Research Council of the National Academies. The committee is jointly sponsored by the Office of the Air Force for Science, Technology and Engineering and the U.S. Department of Defense Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering. Committee members are conducting an 18-month study examining the Department of Defense’s future propulsion needs and the current commercial propulsion technical base to determine whether efforts underway in laboratories and industry will support necessary war-fighting capabilities over the next 15 years. The committee will make recommendations that could affect the Department of Defense’s propulsion development planning in the future. Cizmas came to Texas A&M in 1998 from Westinghouse Science and Technology Center, where he had been a senior engineer since 1995. Cizmas previously worked as a design engineer for the Turbomecanica Jet Engine Co. and as research engineer and later an assistant professor at the Bucharest Polytechnic Institute. His research interests are in the areas of propulsion; unsteady aerodynamics and heat transfer; computational fluid dynamics; fluid-solid interaction; and massive parallel processing. He is also a researcher in the Aerospace Engineering Division of the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, the state’s engineering research agency and a member of The Texas A&M University System. Cizmas is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He holds an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering from the Bucharest Polytechnic Institute and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and materials science from Duke University.
