Dr. Eric Besnard is a Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at CSULB, where he teaches upper division and graduate courses in aerospace system design and astronautics. He is also Project Director for the California Launch Vehicle Education Initiative (CALVEIN). As part of this program he supervises the work of undergraduate and graduate students in the area of liquid-propelled launch vehicle system development and analysis in support of various externally funded projects by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) and Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC).
Over the last 15 years he has been involved in aerodynamic and hydrodynamic research in Computational Fluid Dynamics applied to the design and optimization of ocean, air and space vehicles.
Dr. Besnard is Senior Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Liquid Propulsion Technical Committee (LPTC). He holds an engineering degree with emphasis in energy and material science from the Ecole des Mines (Nancy, France, 1992), an MS in aerospace engineering from CSULB (1992), and a Ph.D. in Engineering and Applied Mathematics from Claremont Graduate University (1998).
