John Evans News

New undergraduate curriculum for Smead Aerospace

Jeff Zehnder — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:27:57 +0000

New undergraduate curriculum for Smead Aerospace Jeff Zehnder Mon, 10/05/2026 - 10:27

New Courses

ASEN 1030: Aerospace Computing
ASEN 2401: Statics
ASEN 2402: Thermodynamics
ASEN 2403: Dynamics
ASEN 2501: Introduction to Astronautics
ASEN 2502: Introduction to Aeronautics
ASEN 3401: Aerospace Structures
ASEN 3402: Aerospace Heat Transfer
ASEN 3403: Aerodynamics
ASEN 3404: Aerospace Dynamics and Control
ASEN 3405: Astrodynamics
ASEN 3406: Aircraft Dynamics
ASEN 3501: Aerospace Experimental Methods
ASEN 3502: Aerospace Computational Methods
ASEN 3503: Aerospace Electronics
ASEN 4401: Aerospace Communication Systems
(Starting AY 27-28)
ASEN 4402: Aerospace Materials and Structural Analysis
(Starting TBD)
ASEN 4404: Applied Aerodynamics
(Starting AY 27-28)
ASEN 4xxx (number pending): Aeroelasticity
(Starting AY 27-28)

Aerospace classes and labs are getting an overhaul at the ��ñ��.

The Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences is in the midst of a multi-year rollout of a new undergraduate curriculum, updating courses, assignments, and hands-on experiences to meet new demands of research, education, and employers.

“The old curriculum was very ambitious when it was developed and made a lot of sense at the time, but it’s important to review your curriculum every so often, modernize it, and adjust it to the workforce and pressing issues,” said Charles Hoke, associate chair for undergraduate studies.

The new curriculum rollout began for first year students in academic year 2024-2025. It is advancing annually as those students progress. The sophomore curriculum started in 2025-2026 and the new junior curriculum began with the current fall semester.

It has brought significant changes to classroom instruction.

“We introduced five new sophomore courses last year and in August we began rolling out nine new junior courses,” said John Evans, professor and chair.

With new classroom instruction also comes new labs, including orbital trajectory projects, a flight simulation studio, construction and testing of gliders, radio signal orienteering, and hands-on experiences with direct application to real events.

“Intro to Astronautics starts with a lab that is a replica of the CO2 scrubbers from Apollo 13. Students have to fit a round peg into a square hole and try to save the astronauts,” Evans said.

A major additional benefit of the new curriculum is more flexibility and streamlined options for students transferring from other majors and universities.

“We used to teach Intro to Thermodynamics and Fluid Dynamics as a single course. Those are separate classes in most programs. That meant that if you had taken one of them in the mechanical engineering department and transferred to aerospace, even though we’re on the same campus, it didn’t map to our curriculum and you’d lose those credits,” Hoke said.

The new curriculum is also designed for scalability. The previous undergraduate program was developed in 1997, and while it has been updated repeatedly, it was intended for a much smaller student body.

“At that time, we had graduating class sizes that were around 50-60. This fall we have well over 300 first year students,” Evans said.

In designing the new curriculum and courses, faculty reviewed offerings at peer universities and changing industry needs, particularly surrounding artificial intelligence.

“Graduating students need to be AI forward,” Evans said. “They need to understand the opportunities it creates, but they also need the judgment to know when to use it. AI can be an extraordinary tool for learning, but sometimes you need to struggle with a problem long enough to build real understanding. Students need to recognize when AI can help them move forward and when they need to work through something for themselves."

Aerospace classes and labs are getting an overhaul at the ��ñ��. Smead Aerospace is in the midst of a multi-year rollout of a...

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Boosting aerospace engineering research and study abroad with France

Jeff Zehnder — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:28:26 +0000

Boosting aerospace engineering research and study abroad with France Jeff Zehnder Fri, 07/17/2026 - 12:28

Jeff Zehnder

Exchanging printed copies of the MOU at the signing. From left: Keith Molenaar, dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science; Marie-Hélène Baroux, director general of ISAE-SUPAERO; and Jill Blondin, vice chancellor for global affairs.

Cap sur de nouveaux horizons !

Aerospace at the ��ñ�� is expanding its ties with France.

��ñ�� leadership met July 15, 2026 with a visiting delegation from the Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace (ISAE-SUPAERO), a leading French institution for aerospace engineering education and research, to sign a formal memorandum of understanding between the two institutions.

“The synergies between our two institutions are extensive,” said John Evans, chair of the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. “This MOU builds on an already active relationship and creates a framework to expand opportunities in both research and education.”

Located in Toulouse, France, ISAE-SUPAERO was founded as the world’s first dedicated aeronautical school, opening its doors in 1909. Over the ensuing century, it expanded its education and research activities into space and today works across the breadth of aerospace engineering. It currently has about 130 permanent faculty and research personnel and enrolls about 2,000 students.

The visiting delegation included Marie-Hélène Baroux, director general of ISAE-SUPAERO, and Florence Puech, deputy head of international relations. They were joined during the visit by Stéphanie Lizy-Destrez, a professor of space systems engineering at ISAE-SUPAERO who spent the past six months at ��ñ�� as a Byram Distinguished Visiting Professor in Smead Aerospace.

Evans is hopeful the partnership will expand opportunities for visiting faculty and students studying abroad on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In the past, study abroad has been challenging for ��ñ�� aerospace students as overseas courses do not easily transfer. The structure of ISAE-SUPAERO’s engineering curriculum offers a particularly strong fit for ��ñ�� aerospace students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The agreement builds on an ongoing relationship between the institutions, including short- and longer-term visits by faculty and students in both Toulouse and Boulder. Lizy-Destrez’s recent appointment provided another example of that collaboration, bringing her expertise in space systems engineering, astrodynamics, and human and robotic space exploration to ��ñ�� students and faculty.

As part of the visit, the French delegation met with Chancellor Justin Schwartz, toured the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and the Aerospace Building, and met with students and faculty.

Signing the MOU for ��ñ�� was Keith Molenaar, dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science, and Jill Blondin, vice chancellor for global affairs.

Aerospace at the ��ñ�� is expanding its ties with France. ��ñ�� leadership met July 15, 2026 with a visiting delegation from the...

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New leadership in Smead Aerospace

Jeff Zehnder — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 14:55:57 +0000

New leadership in Smead Aerospace Jeff Zehnder Wed, 07/01/2026 - 08:55

Jeff Zehnder

John Evans is the new chair of the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the ��ñ��.

A 13-year veteran of the department, Evans was elected by the Smead Aerospace faculty and is taking over from Hanspeter Schaub, who is stepping down after four years of service.

Looking Forward

“I’m very excited. There’s a lot of interest in aerospace right now and lots of new opportunities that directly link to research in our department, including human spaceflight, astrodynamics, quantum sensing, and hypersonics. We’re uniquely positioned to be part of solving big challenges related to these opportunities,” Evans said.

His elevation to chair follows tenure as the department’s associate chair for undergraduate curriculum, where he spearheaded the development and initial deployment of a new undergraduate aerospace curriculum.

The overhaul ensures continued alignment with industry needs and provides new course offerings and academic opportunities for students. It also aims to be more scalable, amid increasing demand for aerospace engineers.

Student Growth

Over the last 15 years, Smead Aerospace has nearly tripled in size to become the second largest undergraduate aerospace program in the United States.

“The growth signals the interest in our department, and more generally, the aerospace industry in Colorado. People want to be here. Throughout this curriculum development process, I’ve been working closely with a lot of faculty and staff. Those relationships are important stepping into the chair role,” Evans said.

As the student body grows, Smead Aerospace is also looking to expand its faculty ranks. Evans said faculty growth will be an important priority as the department responds to rising student demand, emerging research opportunities and the evolving needs of the aerospace sector.

Beyond the classroom, the aerospace chair has responsibilities in donor and industry engagement. Evans said he is looking forward to expanding the department’s industry-sponsored research.

“We’re very involved with industry in senior projects and education, but less on research. There’s a national shift of universities engaging with business more directly on research and there are opportunities we can plug into,” he said.

Aerospace Excellence

Evans joined ��ñ�� in 2013. His research focuses on fluid dynamics and fluid structure interaction. He has been repeatedly recognized as a highly cited researcher and was the 2021 recipient of the Collegiate Educator of the Year award from the Rocky Mountain chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

He holds a PhD in computational and applied mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin.

As chair, Schaub led the department through significant budget restructuring, ongoing enrollment growth, new collaboration with student groups, and development of a formal strategic vision. He remains a member of the aerospace faculty and Evans said he is eager to build on that foundation.

“Hanspeter has done a tremendous amount for the department,” Evans said. “I’m grateful for his leadership and excited to work with our faculty, staff, students, alumni and partners on the next phase for Smead Aerospace.”

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Seminar - The EXHUME Project: Democratizing Immersed and Meshless Finite Element Analysis - Oct. 10

Jeff Zehnder — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 06:12:12 +0000

Seminar - The EXHUME Project: Democratizing Immersed and Meshless Finite Element Analysis - Oct. 10 Jeff Zehnder Fri, 10/03/2025 - 00:12

John Evans
Associate Professor and Chair-Elect, Smead Aerospace
Friday, Oct. 10 | 10:40 A.M. | AERO 111

Abstract: Immersed finite element methods enable the simulation of physical systems that are challenging - or even prohibitively complex - for classical finite element approaches, spanning domains from aerospace (e.g., airflow around flexible wings) to biomedicine (e.g., blood flowing past heart valves). They also streamline computational design optimization, allowing the geometry and material layout of an engineered system to be tailored to prescribed performance metrics. Yet implementing an immersed finite element method remains a time-consuming and technically demanding task, even for experts, limiting its adoption in practice.

The EXHUME (EXtraction for High-order Unfitted finite element MEthods) software library was created to overcome this barrier. By making it possible to transform classical finite element codes into immersed finite element codes with minimal effort, EXHUME empowers a broader community of scientists and engineers to apply these methods. This talk introduces interpolation-based immersed finite element analysis - the key technology behind EXHUME - and demonstrates its efficacy through problems in heat conduction, structural mechanics, and fluid dynamics. I will also show how EXHUME integrates with the open-source platform FEniCS, making interpolation-based immersed finite element analysis accessible within a widely used community tool.

Beyond immersed finite element analysis, interpolation opens a second frontier: converting classical finite element codes into meshless analysis codes. This capability makes it possible to model extreme material behaviors - such as fracture under blast loading - that lie beyond the reach of both classical and immersed finite element analysis. Finally, I will showcase how EXHUME enables classical finite element codes such as FEniCS to be used for shape and topology optimization with little user intervention. By lowering the barrier to entry, the EXHUME project democratizes advanced simulation technologies and broaden their impact across science and engineering.

Bio: John A. Evans is Chair-Elect, Associate Chair for Undergraduate Curriculum, and an Associate Professor in the Ann & H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the ��ñ��. His research lies at the intersection of computational mechanics, numerical analysis, and design optimization, with expertise in finite element, immersed, and isogeometric analysis methodologies. He has received awards for both research and teaching, including the Gallagher Young Investigator Award from the United States Association for Computational Mechanics and Educator of the Year from the Rocky Mountain Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Immersed finite element methods enable the simulation of physical systems that are challenging - or even prohibitively complex - for classical finite element approaches, spanning domains from...

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Advancing real-time data compression for supercomputer research

Jeff Zehnder — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:36:02 +0000

Advancing real-time data compression for supercomputer research Jeff Zehnder Thu, 03/13/2025 - 10:36

Jeff Zehnder

(Clockwise from top left) Alireza Doostan,
Ken Jansen, Stephen Becker, and John Evans.

Alireza Doostan is leading a major effort for real-time data compression for supercomputer research.

A professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the ��ñ��, Doostan is the principal investigator on a $1.2 million Department of Energy project to change how researchers handle the massive amounts of data that result from complex physics problems like modeling turbulence and aerodynamics for air and space craft.

Compressing data is nothing new when it comes to computing, but advances in high- performance systems are now creating so much data that it becomes impossible to store for later analysis.

“Computing power has increased drastically, but moving and storing that data is becoming a bottleneck. We have to reduce the size of the data generated through large scale simulation codes,” Doostan said.

While some scientific analysis of turbulence flows can be completed faster on ever larger high-performance computing platforms, much of the information must be discarded because the scope of the data is too vast to store, making it impossible to conduct later assessments.

“There is a lot of structure and physics embedded in the data that ideally needs to be preserved to study complex flow physics or develop faster models,” Doostan said.

The goal of the grant is to both maintain accuracy of modeling data while decreasing its complexity, and critically, allowing it to be stored by compressing it in-situ, or in real-time as it is created during modeling. This is not currently possible for large-scale models, as existing technology often requires some or the entire modeling simulation be completed before compression can begin.

Joining Doostan on the project is a team of ��ñ�� faculty, including Ken Jansen and John Evans, both also from Smead Aerospace, and Stephen Becker from applied math.

The team is focused on development of both traditional and deep neural models for massively parallel implementation of novel linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques. It is a major undertaking, bringing together researchers with a broad range of backgrounds, including computational physics and sciences, discretization, machine learning, linear algebra, and statistics.

“This is a very interdisciplinary problem,” Doostan said. “This is not a problem one person can solve. You need a team.”

For Jansen, whose research focuses on turbulence modeling, an advance in compression could lead to significant progress across the spectrum of high-performance computing.

“This data compression research is critically important to provide access to the dynamics of our simulations,” Jansen said. “As simulations have passed petascale and are now exascale, it has become impractical to write the full solution fields to disk at a sufficient frequency and count, owing to the broad range of spatial and temporal scales of turbulence.”

The group has completed soon-to-be-published research showing strong promise for their approach. They are now working to scale up their algorithms to work at scale on supercomputing platforms like ��ñ��’s Blanca cluster as well as Department of Energy systems.

“There is still a lot to be done, but our early work has shown success and only increases the computational load by less than five percent,” Doostan said.

The three-year award runs through fall 2027. Doostan is hopeful their final product will include publicly available next-generation compression software for general use by all simulation practitioners.

Alireza Doostan is leading a major effort for real-time data compression for supercomputer research. Doostan is the principal investigator on a $1.2 million...

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Seminar: Data-Driven Turbulence Modeling and Simulation - Oct. 4

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 22:41:35 +0000

Seminar: Data-Driven Turbulence Modeling and Simulation - Oct. 4 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/30/2021 - 16:41

John Evans
Assistant Professor, Smead Aerospace
Monday, Oct. 4 | 12:00 P.M. | Zoom Webinar

Abstract: Turbulent fluid flows are characterized by a wide spectrum of spatial and temporal scales. Unfortunately, the cost of resolving these scales with Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) grows quickly with Reynolds number, so engineers will be unable to apply DNS to aerodynamic flows of industrial interest for many decades to come. Alternatively, one can model all scales using Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) or just the smallest scales using Large Eddy Simulation (LES). RANS remains the turbulence modeling and simulation paradigm of choice in industry while LES continues to grow in popularity. However, state-of-the-art RANS and LES approaches are inaccurate for many aerodynamic flows of industrial interest, especially those exhibiting flow separation or transition to turbulence.

In this talk, I will discuss our work toward arriving at improved RANS and LES approaches by leveraging advances in machine learning and the availability of high-fidelity simulation data for model training. The key to our approach is constructing model forms with embedded invariance properties. This enables us to train remarkably accurate, efficient, and generalizable RANS and LES models using sparse training data. Specifically, I will provide a high-level overview of our approach as well as illustrative numerical results. I will also highlight ongoing and future research directions including Hybrid RANS/LES modeling of separating turbulent boundary layers and in situ learning of turbulence closures from streaming simulation data.

Biography: John Evans is an Assistant Professor and the Jack Rominger Faculty Fellow in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the ��ñ��. His research interests lie at the intersection of computational mechanics, geometry, and approximation theory, with current thrusts in isogeometric analysis, immersogeometric analysis, interactive simulation, and data-driven modeling. He has won a number of awards for his research and teaching including the 2021 Gallagher Young Investigator Award from the United States Association for Computational Mechanics and the 2021 AIAA Rocky Mountain Educator of the Year (College/University), and he is currently Associate Editor of the journal Engineering with Computers.

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Evans is AIAA Rocky Mountain Section Educator of the Year

Anonymous — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 17:56:10 +0000

Evans is AIAA Rocky Mountain Section Educator of the Year Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/02/2021 - 11:56

Jeff Zehnder

John Evans has been named 2021 Educator of the Year by the Rocky Mountain Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Evans, an assistant professor and the Jack Rominger Faculty Fellow in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is an expert in fluid dynamics and fluid-structure interaction. He teaches courses on aerodynamics and finite elements modeling at the undergraduate and graduate level.

He joined ��ñ�� as a faculty member in 2013.

The AIAA RMS will recognize Evans and other 2021 award winners at a banquet at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on August 13.

Numerous ��ñ�� professors have been recognized by the AIAA RMS over the last decade. Previous recipients of the Educator of the Year Award include Hanspeter Schaub in 2020, Alireza Doostan in 2015, and Jean Koster in 2011. In 2020, Allie Anderson was also recognized as their Young Engineer of the Year.

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