Alumni Newsmakers

After 38 years of space engineering, Marla Pérez-Davis, PhD ’91, this summer retired from NASA and the Glenn Research Center, which she has led since late 2019.

She was the first Puerto Rican to lead a NASA space center and a role model to many female science and engineering students at Case. At Homecoming 2022, Pérez-Davis will receive the Meritorious Service Award from the Case Alumni Association.

Upon her retirement, Cleveland’s WKYC-TV and other media outlets recounted her improbable journey from a small town in Puerto Rico to the heights of the nation’s space program.

She credits her mother with pushing her toward college and a career few in her community could imagine. A NASA job fair at the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez led her to Cleveland. She joined Glenn in 1983 as a researcher focused on batteries and fuel cells and began her climb up the engineering ranks.

Pérez-Davis served as Chief of the Electrochemistry Branch, deputy director of research and engineering and deputy director of the center. She also earned her doctorate in chemical engineering at Case while working full time and raising two sons. As Glenn’s director, she led the center and its 3,200 staff and contract personnel into a new era of space travel. Major activities completed during her tenure include the construction of Glenn’s new Research Support Building and testing on the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I Moon mission.

“Marla’s four decades of service to NASA have made a remarkable impact on critical agency goals and missions,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. “Her trailblazing legacy is the members of the Artemis Generation she has inspired to believe that they, too, can work for and lead at NASA.”

Marla Pérez-Davis in the NASA Glenn Hangar.

Known for its coverage of the wonders of the world, National Geographic visited campus recently to view the work of a biomedical engineering team that is changing lives with smart prosthetics.

The cover story in the June issue, The Audacious Science Pushing the Boundaries of Touch, features the work of Professor Dustin Tyler, PhD ’99, whose team is using neural networks and electrical pulses to restore a sense of touch in people who have lost limbs or been paralyzed.

Readers meet Brandon Prestwood, a North Carolina man who lost his hand and left forearm in an industrial conveyor belt. Preston had some sensation restored with Tyler’s experimental prosthetics, an experience he emotionally describes as helping him to “feel whole” again.

As director of CWRU’s Human Fusions Institute, Tyler is leading Case’s efforts to recreate human sensations. He was profiled in the Fall 2021 edition of Case Alumnus in a story titled “Uniting man and machine.” The National Geographic article lends further insight into why his successes are so impressive:

“Because it’s damnably, wondrously complicated, this critical interplay of skin, nerves, and brain: to understand, to measure, and to re-create in a way that feels ... human. Brandon Prestwood is a case in point. Inside the Sensory Restoration Lab, as the Case Western Reserve researchers ran him through tests, there were encouraging developments; when Prestwood made the prosthetic hand close around a foam block, for example, he felt a pressure against the foam. A connection. A tingling that seemed to be coming from fingers he no longer possessed.”

Tyler described an engineering challenge that fascinates him as much as anyone.

“The system we’re working with” — the interplay of receptors, nerves, and brain, he means — “is always taking information in, filing it, associating it, connecting it, and creating our us,” he told the magazine. “There is no beginning and end to it. We’re trying to tap into that.”

The National Geographic article, which requires a subscription, can be accessed at www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine.

Dustin Tyler confers with Brandon Prestwood.

PhD ’68, immigrated to America at age 13. Four years later, he was named valedictorian of Cleveland's East High School and won a scholarship to Case Institute of Technology.

Hecker earned three metallurgy degrees from Case, including his doctorate, on his way to becoming director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

On July 4, he was named one of America’s “Great Immigrants” by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The renowned nuclear scientist was included in an honor role of 34 naturalized Americans that incudes rock 'n' roll legend Neil Young, tennis champion Steffi Graff and Nobel laureate and physicist Syukuro Manabe.

Each year, the Carnegie Corp. spotlights immigrants whose contributions and actions have enriched and strengthened U.S. society and the nation’s democracy, in the spirit of Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie. Hecker seems to fit all the criteria of an American success story.

He lost his father in World War II and left Austria in 1956 to join family in Cleveland, which proved a good place to launch. In a 2019 interview, Hecker noted he landed in a city teeming with immigrants. He was elected president of his high school class despite still struggling with English.

“I have a soft spot for refugees and immigrants,” he said in 2019. “I will never forget how this country welcomed me with open arms.”

After spending the early 1970s as a metallurgist at General Motors, Hecker joined Los Alamos in 1973 and rose through the ranks of materials science to become director from 1986 to 1997. With his deep knowledge of plutonium and doomsday weapons, he became the nation’s foremost nuclear weapons negotiator and nonproliferation expert. His work took him to forbidden zones in the former Soviet Union, China and even North Korea.

In 2004, Hecker was honored by the Case Alumni Association with its Gold Medal.

Now a professor emeritus at Stanford University, he remains one of the nation’s most influential nuclear scientists.

Jeff Taylor ’09 started his drone company 10 years ago making and selling miniature airplanes that farmers and real estate agents used to map crops or snap pictures of properties. They cost $600 and could stay aloft for about an hour.

Today, drones produced by Taylor’s company, Event 38 Unmanned Systems, have wing spans of 10 feet or more, advanced camera capabilities and sell for close to $20,000. Thanks to fuel cell technology, they may soon stay airborne all day.

The Case engineer is carving out a niche at the sophisticated end of the drone market — and drawing attention.

In June, Crain’s Cleveland Business profiled Taylor and his company, noting he has succeeded in attracting federal, state and university support to advance drone technology.

The company announced a successful demo flight in June of a drone powered by a hydrogen fuel cell at the Kent State University airport. It was developed in partnership with Yanhai Du, a KSU professor and fuel cell specialist.

“Fuel cells are a promising power source for drones,” observed sUAS News, a newsletter covering the drone industry. “Using a fuel cell can extend a drone’s flight time by a significant margin, which is a great advantage.”

Taylor, an aerospace engineer, started Event 38 in 2012 in San Diego. He soon came home to build his drones in Akron. Event 38 has since sold more than 600 drones and enjoys annual revenue in the millions of dollars, Crain’s reported. With eight employees, the company now builds its drones in Richfield.

Its flagship model, the E400, has fixed wings plus four vertically mounted propellers that enable it to take off and land nearly anywhere. It comes with advanced mapping functions, multi- and hyper-spectral camera capabilities, and can fly for 90 minutes at a time. "Our customer is someone who already has two or three multi-rotor drones," Taylor said. "They say, 'I keep getting contracts for 800-acre jobs and it takes me all day to do it.'"