TAMEST Member Profile: John L. Junkins, Ph.D. (NAE), Texas A&M University

TAMEST Member John L. Junkins, Ph.D. (NAE), Texas A&M University, is a pioneering aerospace engineer who has spent more than five decades shaping the future of his field while mentoring the next generation of researchers and innovators in our country. He is currently a Regents and Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering, Royce E. Wisenbaker Chair and Founding Director of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study at Texas A&M. From January to June 2021, he also served as Interim President of Texas A&M.

Dr. Junkins credits a young fascination with space exploration during the Apollo era and an opportunity to work at NASA early in his career for helping cement his commitment to advancing aerospace engineering. In 1996, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to flight mechanics and flexible vehicle control. Dr. Junkins has dedicated much of his work to fostering excellence and cross-disciplinary cooperation within the scientific and engineering communities and his career is a testament to the power of mentorship, collaboration and visionary thinking.

He was instrumental in the founding of TAMEST with Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and other top Texas researchers in 2004. In 2010, his leadership in the development of the Hagler Institute helped not only to propel Texas A&M to new heights in research but has also created an unparalleled environment for National Academy members to come to Texas and collaborate with the world’s leading experts in their fields.

Each year,  the Hagler Institute selects top national and international scholars to pursue advanced study at Texas A&M for up to a year, and in 2024 they announced their largest class in their 14-year history. The program’s goal is to provide a stellar environment for research and scholarship, with the Hagler Fellows having the freedom to pursue their own research interests and collaborations. Each fellow is a member of the National Academies and many of these researchers go on to join the faculty of Texas A&M full-time and become a vital part of the Texas research community.

In 2022, TAMEST recognized Dr. Junkins with the Kay Bailey Hutchison Distinguished Service Award for attracting and nurturing top-tier research talent in Texas through the Hagler Institute. TAMEST connected with Dr. Junkins to learn more about his remarkable career path, expanding the number of National Academy members in Texas and the origins of TAMEST and the Hagler Institute. 

Tell us about your early background and how you got into aerospace engineering.

In high school, I was mainly focused on trying to excel in athletics until my senior year. I was paying attention to the space race with the then Soviet Union and I listened and watched with intense excitement to President Kennedy giving several “Apollo Quest” speeches. 

I was torn, because I had illusions that I could play college football and study engineering, but my football coach, Crossland Clegg whose opinion I respected, gave me the unambiguous assessment that he felt I had much more upside in academics than in athletics. He also told me trying to do both was a really dumb idea. 

I was probably en route to getting the right answer, but Coach Clegg’s “absence of ambiguity” catalyzed me to “throw the switch” to begin trying to excel in academics to pursue engineering. Remarkably, 18 months after that conversation, as a co-op student from Auburn, I began work at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and shook the hand of the center director, Dr. Wernher von Braun. 

I have been surfing on a wave of enthusiasm for aerospace engineering ever since. As a first-generation college student, even with my poor high school preparation, I was blessed with a wonderful opportunity at NASA, and I was even more fortunate that I got off to a strong start. I had the advantages that I was born at the right time and had the extraordinary opportunity to be mentored by the strongest aerospace engineers of that era.  

More importantly, I was engaged in the greatest technical adventure in the history of mankind. My focus and excitement were off the charts. However, while I had already encountered daunting challenges at NASA, the bar was about to be raised (as a former pole vaulter, I was about to learn my previous personal best was not going to be good enough).

Talk about how the ‘space race’ of the 1960s helped to cement your future in the industry.

It goes without saying that the excitement of the early Apollo years set the die for my career. After graduating from Auburn in 1965, I immediately married my fiancé Elouise Click whom I had met 2 years earlier taking night courses at the University of Alabama while working at NASA. 

In early 1966, we moved to Santa Monica to pursue my Ph.D. studies at UCLA and time-shared full-time employment at McDonnell Douglas Missile and Space Systems. We were launching satellites aboard the Delta rocket – we were essentially the Elon Musks of that era. 

One year, we did 11 launches. We were inventing and immediately implementing new and exciting technologies. Some of the analytics underlying my day job at McDonnell Douglas were embedded into my dissertation research. My wife Elouise gave birth to our son Stephen in 1967, and in December of 1969, I graduated with an M.S. and a Ph.D. from UCLA.

The four years ending in December 1969 were an intense blur of exciting satellite-launching activity timed-shared with academic research and study. The excitement was just beginning.

What were the early years of your academic career like?

In 1970, I accepted my first academic appointment as a 26-year-old Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia (UVA). My favorite UCLA Professor, Peter Likins, was crucial in helping me land the position at UVA. 

While young and green in academics, I had gained significant “mileage” with over seven years of time-shared experience as an aerospace engineer already. From 1970-1974, I was lucky to land a Principal Investigator role on the Apollo 15-17 Lunar Science Team as my first University project.  

My goal was to determine the precise cross-sectional slices of the moon’s shape, from the first ever laser altimeter (fired every 20 seconds from the Command Module) and to integrate these measurements with the rest of the navigation and mapping systems aboard the Command Module. 

Our daughter Kathryn was born in Charlottesville in 1973. Our family was growing and my career was moving along; I was living my dreams. During the mid-1970s, motivated by challenges I had to overcome extracting useful information from the sensors and the pre-digital camera technologies of the Apollo mapping camera system, I utilized the first space-qualified digital (CCD) camera and developed an on-board, real-time star-based navigation technique. 

Cousins of this technology are flying today for precision pointing of most modern spacecrafts. I wrote my first book, mentored my first three Ph.D. offspring, and also developed a computationally efficient and accurate model of the earth’s gravity field. This work culminated in a validation mission for the Polaris missile inertial guidance system, and I witnessed a memorable test mission in 1977 with a missile launched from the S.S. Thomas Jefferson nuclear-powered submarine. 

In 1977, at age 34, I moved from UVA to become a full professor at Virginia Tech (VT). I made this move because Virginia Tech had multiple faculty in my area of interest to facilitate collaborations. In the early 1980s, I had the opportunity to develop and implement, for a pre-GPS navigation satellite, a neat technique to re-orient spacecraft using solar power, an electromagnet and the earth’s magnetic field. For this accomplishment, I won my first national honor, the 1983 AIAA Mechanics and Control of Flight Award. I was 40 years old and happily pursuing a fun career at Virginia Tech – moving to Texas had never entered my mind.

When did you start at Texas A&M University?

Sometime during the early-1980s, my sponsor (AFOSR) held a review meeting at MIT. There I met a great professor and Associate Dean Herbert Richardson who told me that he was about to accept the job as Dean of Engineering at Texas A&M. 

During the spring of 1985, Carl Erdman and Skip Fletcher, who were former colleagues with me at the University of Virginia, knocked on my office door at Virginia Tech. Around 1980, both of these senior professors had earlier been recruited by Herb Richardson to join him at Texas A&M. 

They were now both Associate Deans, and Skip was the Executive Associate Dean. After denying their initial claim that they “just happened to be in the neighborhood,” I learned that these two were there as a “tag-team” to execute a “pleasant ambush” of me. Skip told me that they had come to congratulate me, as I would soon hold the first endowed chair in the Texas A&M College of Engineering. I told them that I was flattered but not interested in relocating and I had never even visited College Station. 

They kept insisting that Elouise and I visit because Herb Richardson had received blessings from the provost to offer this position to me. “If you don’t at least visit, after all the effort we have gone through, you will make bruises on Herb and your other friends,” I was told. I finally agreed to visit. While not anticipating I would accept, I was amazed at the commanding vision and resources that Herb presented. After reflection, I ultimately accepted the offer to help build strength in an un-ranked aerospace department (of only 12 faculty then). As of today, we have a 45 faculty in a top 10 caliber department.

What has made you stay in Texas throughout your career? 

Without delving into details, my teaching and research accelerated after joining Texas A&M. I gained several early recognitions including election to the NAE in 1996. I found Texas A&M to be a wonderful environment with a “can do” attitude that facilitated rapid advancements in the quality of the department I joined in 1985. As my career moved forward, I increasingly became aware of the importance of strengthening our faculty and ensuring high-quality mentorship of students. 

Today I have graduated 60 Ph.D. offspring, and I think I hold a record no one officially keeps – half of my Ph.D. graduates have gone into academia. Consequently, I have four generations of Ph.D. offspring. It is clear that papers, books, patents, new technologies are all great, but the ultimate repository for new knowledge are the students who helped the professor develop the new results. 

If I look at the total research output of my Ph.D. offspring and compare it to my contributions last year, it is obvious that they collectively dwarf the volume and significance of my annual output. It does not take a rocket scientist (and I am a rocket scientist) to conclude: My descendants and their offspring will advance my field, and discover things I never dreamed of, and this will proceed for generations to come.

Fostering their productivity and helping them launch successful careers allows me to “pay forward” all of the amazing opportunities that I have had. 

You are the Director of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study. Please talk about the mission of the Hagler Institute and why it’s vital to recruit National Academy Members to Texas.

In the late 1990s, under the leadership of Ray Bowen and Jon Hagler, Texas A&M developed a strategic plan called Vision 2020. This plan was long on important goals, but short on the means to achieve them. The number one goal was to elevate the faculty and better connect them to their disciplines in the greater national and international community of scholars. 

In 1999, it was in response to that strategic plan that I wrote a one-page white paper outlining a virtual advanced study institute that would be driven directly by faculty ambitions to collaborate with the best and brightest in their disciplines. The structure was simple, but it was a revolutionary concept where the individual faculty would “dream the impossible dream” and simply identify the superstar they wanted to join them for the mother of all sabbaticals, and the institute would make many of these dreams come true. It took over a decade to realize the idea that my 1999 white paper outlined. My Chancellor provided half of the five-year start-up funds in September of 2011, and the Institute immediately took off.

Instead of a lengthy proposal, the nomination is only a two-page form that could be filled out in an hour and then routed through their dean. The dean organizes a process to filter the proposals to send forth a single digit number of nominations (a college quota). These proposals are expanded in a systematic way into a dossier that addresses three questions: 1. Is the nominee of world-class stature?; 2. Does the nominee remain an active leader in his/her field?; 3. Is the nominee a great mentor? 

Only those nominees for which the three answers are clearly “yes” are considered further. After that, a rank-ordered set of “academic venture capital” individuals are established by an elected committee of distinguished professors and the Institute Director then provides an invitation to the program.

With these standards being enforced, of course, none of these superstars need a job.  Remarkably, last year over 80% said yes to give us our largest class of 19 Hagler Fellows.

What makes the institute so successful?

Our high success rate is a function of several considerations, but perhaps the key is flexibility. We allow the Fellows to fit their appointment into their schedule with up to 12 months in residence with their in-person visits spread over up to five years. Obviously, there are quite a few other considerations, the collaborations implicit in the appointment needs to make professional sense to the prospective Fellow and the stipend has to be attractive. Nothing works if these stars do not find being a Hagler Fellow very attractive.

It is of vital importance to have an easy way for the faculty to act on their ambitions to team with top people in their field. These collaborations have proven to be life-changing for many faculty hosts, graduate students, and remarkably, the Fellows themselves. 

For the institute to succeed as it has, the Fellows must have a great experience, and as a consequence, 25% of those who have completed their appointments have joined our faculty. In 2011, when Chancellor John Sharp and I met to discuss this proposal, we had only 11 members of the National Academies on our faculty. Today there are 57. This revolutionary five-fold increase in academy membership is unmatched anywhere else. 

 The Hagler Institute also recently announced the new Chancellor’s National Academy STEM Ph.D. Fellowship Program at Texas A&M to attract more of the nation’s top STEM students to our state. Talk about this new fellowship program, which connects students with National Academy Members and other rising star faculty, and what it hopes to achieve. 

The genesis of this program is as follows: I was discussing with Chancellor John Sharp the expense of funding STEM graduate students and the need for endowment. He asked me to go over the costs per student and I was simply amazed at the rapidity in which he indicated he wanted to fund a very substantial Ph.D. fellowship program. 

Within two weeks of our initial conversation, we began organizing the launch of this program, so that we could attract the first cohort of Ph.D. students to start in the fall of 2025. We decided to focus initially on the National Academy members we presently have on our faculty and design this program around a National Academy member and another faculty protégé that the academy member chooses. 

This two-faculty team will co-advise each fellowship-holding Ph.D. student that will be selected after a national competition. This competition will likely attract several hundred applicants that will compete for at least 15 super star Ph.D. students entering each year. We expect truly off-the-charts well-qualified Ph.D. fellowship holders as a result. Chancellor Sharp committed his office to fund this program for the first four years. He has made the case to the Regents and he is virtually certain that future chancellors will continue this funding. 

We anticipate that it will elevate our entire graduate program in STEM fields by attracting highly qualified fellowship students every year, in perpetuity. In the fourth year and thereafter, there will be about 60 stellar fellowship funded students on campus at any one point in time. The impact on our already strong STEM graduate programs will be further elevated and some of these already strong programs will surely reach truly elite stature. Great faculty attract great students, but the converse is also true.

We will also encourage additional internal collaborations as appropriate to teams with the current Hagler Fellows on-campus. The combination of our existing academy members, current Hagler Fellows and 60 stellar STEM fellowship holders will make a unique community of scholars that will elevate and accelerate all concerned. Let the good times roll!

 In 2022, you received the Kay Bailey Hutchison Distinguished Service Award for your unique vision and dedication to bringing more researchers and innovators to Texas through the Hagler Institute. What did this honor mean to you? 

Senator-Ambassador Kay Bailey Hutchison has my utmost respect. She and I have been friends and collaborators for well over two decades. She and Peter O’Donnell, Jr. called together 10 scholars and academic leaders over 20 years ago and we collectively invented TAMEST. 

In some sense, the innovative thinking on that day provided the “wallpaper for the room” a few years later, when I was inspired to invent the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study. The impact of Senator Hutchison and her visionary leadership has been enormous for Texas and our nation. She is an inspirational Texas icon and receiving this TAMEST award that bears her name was indeed a great honor. 

I learned about my selection as the target of a Zoom call from then-TAMEST Board President David Daniel, Ph.D. (NAE) and TAMEST Executive Director Terrence Henry. I accepted this honor on behalf of an incredible team that includes Associate Directors Clifford Fry and Amanda Scott, Chancellor Sharp, Jon Hagler, Norm Augustine, my wife Elouise – and too many others to list.

I have been blessed with the opportunity to create and lead this institute and it has been a singular honor to see this constructive forward momentum result from working with such great and highly committed people. Having the Honorable Kay Bailey Hutchison put her medal around my neck was indeed a high honor and will always be a treasured memory. I am deeply appreciative.

 You’ve spent a lot of your career helping to nurture and cultivate talent in our state. Why is mentorship so crucial for students and early career faculty? 

I was blessed, at virtually every stage of my career, especially the first two decades, with great mentors and collaborators. Collectively, these investments by senior peers have no-doubt been decisive in helping me “see the future” possibilities that have shaped my life. 

Also, I have realized the power that comes from collaborating with great students. Virtually every technical accomplishment associated with my name is shared with great students. In particular, the 60 Ph.D. students I have mentored, every one of them, has made tremendous contributions to our collaborative efforts. 

Finally, as I watched multiple generations of my technical off-spring build on what they learned from me, it is clear that I can justify working hard on mentoring students for purely selfish reasons. More fundamentally, the bond between professors and students can be almost as strong as parents and children. The vicarious pleasure I derive from former students’ success is very significant. Similar motivations carry over to mentoring young faculty, frequently, acting more like an older brother helps them navigate various obstacles and find “true north” when difficult decisions must be made.  

The bottom line: it always pleases me to see senior professors making a difference through mentoring, motivating and helping open doors for the next generation. The Hagler Institute is essentially an organization that scales up a powerful means to create opportunities for both students and professors at Texas A&M.

 What makes you most passionate about your work? 

I still love doing technical work, especially when I gain insight to do something significant that will stand the test of time.

Obviously, my life makes a statement that I enjoy developing young people and I take vicarious pleasure from the successes of my offspring. The record shows I am borderline good at developing people that are stronger and better than me! 

What does being a member of the NAE and TAMEST mean to you? 

I am very proud of TAMEST and that I had a small part helping to create it. I have been amazed at the quality of the O’Donnell Award Recipients. We have a legacy of “picking winners.”  As one example, consider: Dr. Zhijian “James” Chen. He was an O’Donnell Award recipient in 2007, became an NAS and TAMEST member in 2014, won a Breakthrough Prize in 2019 and a Lasker prize this year. He is just amazing!