Dennis Roach is the President and Chief Engineer at DR Engineering. He has over 30 years of experience in the areas of experimental and analytical assessment and nondestructive inspection of structures and mechanical systems. His specialty is in damage tolerance and inspection of composite and metallic materials for civil and aerospace applications including the development of sensors for in-situ health monitoring. His work seeks to maintain the airworthiness of the aging commercial and military aircraft fleet and to extrapolate this technology to energy infrastructure, as well as civil industries and Homeland Security arenas. This has included work for the Department of Transportation, Department of Defense, Structural Monitoring Systems, NASA, General Motors, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Embraer and Exxon among other agencies.
Before starting DR Engineering, Dr. Roach spent 35 years at Sandia National Laboratories where he was a Senior Technical Fellow, and the Chief Engineer in the FAA’s Airworthiness Assurance Center which Sandia Labs operated for the Federal Aviation Administration. Prior to joining Sandia, Dr. Roach worked on the Space Shuttle program at Boeing and was a research fellow at the National Aerospace Laboratory in the Netherlands. He is a founding member of the SAE Aerospace Industry Steering Committee on Structural Health Monitoring, chairs the Inspection Task Group within the Commercial Aircraft Composite Repair Committee and is a member of the IEC Wind Blade Integrity Assessment Committee.
Dr. Roach has seven patents and over 250 technical publications including a co-authored book on the application of advanced composite materials and two co-authored books on in-situ Structural Health Monitoring. In addition, he has given invited workshops and seminars around the world including: the Royal Australian Air Force, the National Research Council of Canada, Airbus, the Australian Defense Science and Technology Organization, the Polish Air Force Institute of Technology, the Japanese Aerospace Development Consortium, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, the Air Force Research Labs, the University of British Columbia, Oxford University, and many U.S. universities. He received his degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Texas and Pacific University.