For a good portion of his career, Bobby Braun has wrestled with the technological challenges of putting spacecraft on Mars. His landing in Boulder, where he’ll take over in January as dean of the University of Colorado’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, proved a long-awaited but less complicated re-entry.
Continuing a career that includes a recent turn as NASA’s chief technologist, the 51-year-old Braun brings decades of research, management and collaboration in both academia and the public sector to a school he sees at a nexus of research and industry. After he left NASA, he had several inquiries from schools looking to capitalize on his experience.
CU simply made sense.
“The state has such strong industry, not just in aerospace, but in energy, in robotics, in software, in chemical and biological fields,” Braun says. “I’m someone that likes to do research that is a benefit to industry. It just seemed like a natural place for me at some point. It took awhile to figure out what I should be doing out here.”
Braun takes over from Robert Davis, a 34-year member of the CU faculty and dean of the college since 2002, who will return to a faculty position.
A Washington, D.C., native and son of an electrical engineer and a social worker, Braun has the kind of broad and distinguished portfolio that will raise the college’s profile, says Penny Axelrad, chair of CU Boulder’s aerospace engineering sciences department.
“I think we’ll get a bump from his reputation,” Axelrad says, “and I think that will focus some attention on us. People always say we’re the best kept secret and we all keep saying, ‘Why are we keeping it a secret?’ I think he’ll do good job helping let the secret out.”
That’s precisely Braun’s intent.
“There are some real stellar faculty in this college who are largely unknown to the world,” he says. “They’re great teachers, great researchers, but outside of Boulder on the national scene, they may not be as well known as, frankly, they should be. I felt I could help elevate them onto the national stage a little bit.”
Since 2010, Braun has been making annual trips to Colorado to meet with sponsors of his research, including Ball Aerospace, Sierra Nevada Corp. and Lockheed Martin. Last year, he was the keynote speaker at a CU symposium in Vail and recently attended the university’s Grand Challenge, which explores solutions to worldwide issues.
But as far back as 1991, when he was driving cross-country from NASA’s Langley Research Center to California, where he would begin his doctorate at Stanford, he has had Boulder on his mind. On that trip, he stopped off to pick up a buddy in Denver, and they all wound up crashing at a friend’s house in Boulder — Braun’s introduction to the college town.
“To be honest, it was so much fun, I thought of staying,” he recalls.
But it would be decades before the stars aligned. Meanwhile, he worked for NASA in several capacities, spent time at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and 13 years at Georgia Tech, where he founded the school’s space technology and research center. Along the way, he conducted work on multiple space systems, several of them Mars-related and dealing with his specialty — entry, descent and landing technology.
Braun had a hand in Mars Pathfinder in 1996 and the Sojourner rover, which landed a year later — and worked on every Mars landing since.
“Successes and failures,” he says.
In 2010, he became NASA’s chief technologist, a position that helped guide the agency’s direction and advocate for the budget to fund it. Braun worked out of Washington, D.C., most of the week while still flying back to Atlanta on Fridays to work with students at Georgia Tech and then carve out some family time on the weekend.
Braun was constantly pressing Congress for a more robust budget to advance technology that would produce payoffs not only for the space agency, but for the inevitable spinoffs, says Keith Cowing, editor at the industry website NASA Watch.
“So he was in a position to try and just be almost an evangelist for taking advantage of new technology, trying to weave it all together,” Cowing says. “Going to other planets and doing things in space could be not only cheaper but more productive in the long run.
“He was a techno-evangelist.”
But in 2011, Braun announced that he wouldn’t be coming back for another two-year stint and returned full-time to Georgia Tech. He says that having kids in high school drove his decision to quit splitting time between Washington and home. But once all three kids were in college, he and his wife decided that if they were going to try something new, this would be the time.
Cowing figures academia offers a perfect outlet for someone with Braun’s ambitious agenda.
“I think he’s a colossal find for the folks in Boulder,” he adds. “With Bobby, it’s not just Bobby, but the people he’s going to recruit to work there. I’d keep an eye out for who else starts to show up there once he’s in his office.”
Waleed Abdalati — director of the Boulder-based Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, which partners with CU — overlapped with Braun for about a year at NASA. Abdalati was chief scientist, a position with common functions to the chief technologist but in different areas.
He notes that Braun didn’t hesitate to back him — an approach that he sees reinforcing the sense that the new dean will take a broad view to improving the engineering school beyond his own interest in aerospace.
“He’s effective in persuasion,” Abdalati says. “I don’t mean like in a sales sense, but making logical, rational, reasoned arguments in the interest of moving forward and accomplishing what he perceives to be the right thing. It’s not simply getting what he wants. He really takes the time to figure out, very thoughtfully, what the right thing is, the best path forward given the objectives at hands.”
Braun outlines four general areas where he hopes to have an impact as dean: research, education, reach and culture.
He praises the research arm of the college that already has a national reputation and voices a desire to grow its impact — “with industry, with federal government, in an entrepreneurial way in terms of spinning out companies and creating jobs,” he says. “If the state of Colorado wants to build high-tech jobs for the future, there’s no better way to do that than by investing in an engineering college, particularly one as strong as this one.”
Academically, he wants to make CU’s engineering school “the destination for all qualified students in the state of Colorado.” To that end, he envisions ramping up partnership opportunities with other Colorado schools, including community colleges.
Faced with challenges in areas such as water, energy, population growth and agriculture — problems without national boundaries — Braun wants the college’s research and the students it produces to have an increasingly global reach. That means increasing the number of international students on campus as well as the number of CU students who participate in international programs.
Finally, he hopes to push back against the caricature of engineers as one-dimensional, data-driven drones with pocket-protectors by “providing a broad educational experience that includes business and some entrepreneurial skills for some of the students, or includes some humanities skills, communications skills, team skills.”
“I want to make this a place that people want to be,” he says.
Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for pushing boundaries of high-risk, high-reward research, whether at the university level or at NASA. That won’t change with his arrival in Boulder.
“It’s true that failure is not an option when you’re dealing with human life,” Braun says, referencing NASA’s human spaceflight program. “But when you’re dealing with research, failure is an option. If failure is not an option, I’d argue you’re not innovating at a sufficient pace. And your results are not going to have the impact you want.
“To me, it all comes back to impact.”
