At our annual banquet on June 6th at Lake Union Café in Seattle we honored the following three Award winners:
- Greg Chandra as the Young Engineer of the Year
- Tim Hinerman as the STEM Advocate of the Year
- Olaf Weckner as the Industry Engineer of the Year
Below is a short description of their accomplishments based on which they were given these awards.
The PNW AIAA Council once more extends our congratulations to the award winners!
Greg Chandra – Young Engineer of the Year
Greg Chandra is a lifetime & senior member of AIAA. He is currently a senior systems engineer at the Boeing Company, where he started in 2007 as a materials, processes and physics engineer on the defense side in Mesa, then moved to the commercial side where he led spatial integration engineering efforts on the 777 and 777X airplanes. In his role on the 777-8 his work involved coordination across many different teams to support the Airplane Configuration Preliminary Design Review, where his leadership stood out. Outside of work Greg is an active member of SPEEA, the professional aerospace union. He is a key member who has planned multiple events that educate members as to their benefits. He constantly seeks member feedback and follows through with member questions. He has received several SPEEA awards for his activities. Greg has also demonstrated great dedication to community involvement by serving active roles with Boeing REACH (for new hires) and BAAPA (Boeing Asian American Professional Association).
Greg Chandra – 2019 Young Engineer of the Year
Tim Hinerman – STEM Advocate of the Year
Tim Hinerman is a lifetime & senior member of AIAA. He is currently the Test & Flight Operations Director at Blue Origin. He is specialized in developing and deploying liquid engine technology. He is also an active member of ASME, JANNAF and served on the AIAA board of directors.
The reason Mr. Hinerman is awarded the “STEM Advocate of the Year Award” are his efforts to introduce K-12 students to the wonderful world of aerospace engineering. He supports schools in Kent and in Texas (near the Blue Origin launch site) by volunteering and teaching guest lectures. He is also instrumental in developing official partnerships between Blue Origin and the Kent School District and the Van Horn School District in Texas, including hosting all middle school teachers at Blue Origin, offering professional development and providing tours of Blue Origin. Over his career he has also mentored a dozen college students on running AIAA chapters and general career advice.
Tim Hinerman – 2019 STEM Advocate of the Year
Olaf Weckner – Industry Engineer of the Year
Olaf Weckner is a newly-inducted Associate Technical Fellow at the Boeing Company, which is a recognition for technical expertise that is only bestowed upon ~2% of the engineers. He joined Boeing in 2005 after obtaining his PhD from TU Berlin in Germany and after doing a Post Doc at MIT. He is an expert in composite modeling and method development, with significant contributions on the 777X wing design, great work in the areas of “smarter testing” and panel buckling methods that are now standard across Boeing. His work has resulted in 4 US patents. He teaches classes on composite analysis at Boeing, and reviews articles for several well-known journals. He has authored 17 journal publications and has presented a dozen conference papers, many of them at the national AIAA conferences. Olaf has also been an active member of the AIAA Multi-Disciplinary Optimization (MDO) Technical Committee since 2013. For his technical body of work and his contributions to the state-of-the-art inside and outside Boeing we are awarding him the “Industry of the Year” Award.
Olaf Weckner – 2019 Industry Engineer of the Year
