Dr. David B. Doman

West Virginia University presents Doman with an Honorary Doctorate of Engineering for attaining national and international preeminence in the field of aerospace engineering and for providing distinguished leadership and service in his field and to his community.

Dr. David B. Doman is a Principal Aerospace Engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Director of the Control Science Center in the Aerospace Systems Directorate. A native of Fort Ashby, West Virginia, he earned the rank of Eagle Scout in 1984. He was licensed as a private pilot and graduated from Frankfort High School in 1987. In 1989 he graduated from Potomac State College and transferred to West Virginia University, where he graduated magna cum laude with a BS in Aerospace Engineering in 1991 and received the WVU College of Engineering Rufus A. West Award. He earned an MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Purdue University in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Virginia Tech in 1998.

During his 24 year career as a civilian with the U.S. Air Force, he has been responsible for several research, development, and flight demonstration projects. With a strong preference for remaining actively engaged in the technical aspects of work, he has made research contributions to a wide range of topics in aerospace engineering including: dynamics and control for reusable launch vehicles, hypersonic aircraft, flapping-wing micro air vehicles, pilot modeling, precision airdrop, and aircraft thermal performance. He has been the author or co-author of over 160 widely cited scholarly publications and has been awarded 4 U.S. patents with 3 more pending.

He has received numerous awards for his research and has been the co-recipient of the top technical awards presented by the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Aerospace Systems Directorate and its predecessors. He was awarded the directorate’s Dr. Courtland D. Perkins Award in 2000, the General Benjamin D. Foulois award in 2003 & 2010, and the S. D. Heron Award in 2012. In 2008, he was awarded the Royal Aeronautical Society Silver Medal for his work on control-oriented modeling of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles. In 2010, he was inducted into the WVU Academy of Distinguished Alumni of Aerospace Engineering. In 2011, he received the highest level award presented by the U.S. Air Force for basic research, the John L. McLucas Award, for contributions to the science of dynamics and control of micro air vehicles. In 2013, he was named an Air Force Research Laboratory Fellow, the highest AFRL honor possible, with only 0.6% of the Laboratory’s engineers and scientists having been chosen to receive the title. He is also a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

He has actively served his local community, WVU, and professional engineering societies at the national and international level. He has recently served on the Visiting Committee of the WVU Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics, and as the Chair of the Guidance, Navigation, and Control Technical Committee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.