49er Industry Chats: An Engineering Career of Hard Problems and Creative Solutions

Principal Director, Guidance and Control, The Aerospace Corporation

After a career of 40 years working in the Petrochemical, Defense and Space Industries, all in the field of Control Systems, one objective has remained constant - to find the most interesting and challenging engineering problems and work on cross-disciplinary teams to solve them. Across multiple industries and in positions of increasing responsibility, Christopher Dunbar has had the opportunity to live and work in the arctic performing R&D for a natural gas pipeline, designed and tested the guidance system for a nuclear ICBM, and supported the DoD across a variety of space programs ranging from modeling, simulation and analysis for the Strategic Defense Initiative (i.e. Star Wars), to the most recent conceptual Space Force studies to architect and build proliferated low earth orbit (pLEO) constellations comprised of hundreds of satellites offering increased resiliency and reconfigurable advanced technologies. Chris holds both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from CSULB. He received awards for his master’s thesis, both from the Department of Electrical Engineering and the College of Engineering, and is a member of Eta Kapp Nu, the Electrical Engineering Honor Society. Recently Chris became the Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department’s Industry Advisory Team and currently acts as Executive Champion to CSULB on behalf of his company. He is presently the Principal Director and Manager of the Guidance and Control Subdivision, comprised of 145 engineers, technicians and support staff, at the Aerospace Corporation, a Federally Funded Research and Development Center, located in El Segundo CA.