In 1965, after earning bachelor's and master's degrees at Purdue in aeronautical and engineering sciences, Dr. Kessler began a 10-year career at McDonnell Douglas in engineering and management, earning a doctoral degree in chemical engineering from Washington University in 1974. Dr. Kessler joined the Air Force in 1975 as a senior materials research engineer and in 1981 was appointed Special Assistant to the Director of the Air Force Materials Laboratory. In 1988 Dr. Kessler became head of the Manufacturing Technology Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a program that pioneers manufacturing developments for all Air Force products. In this position he led numerous pioneering initiatives, including the Lean Aerospace Initiative – a partnership among government-industry-labor-academia – to address the affordability of military aerospace systems. Dr. Kessler also has served as an adjunct professor at the University of Dayton since 1975, teaching graduate-level classes in numerical methods and transport phenomena in the School of Chemical Engineering. In 1997 he joined Lockheed Martin Aeronautics as Vice-President of Advanced Enterprise Initiatives and became the executive organizational architect to ensure the full realization of the company’s concept of operations and positions the LM Aero to responsively support future aerospace power-projection requirements. While at Lockheed, he accepted a part-time visiting faculty position with the Edenfield Executive-in-Residence program at the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology.