Dr. William Ko, Aerospace Engineer, Engineering Directorate, Aerostructures Branch, Dryden Flight Research Center

Dr. William Ko joined NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in 1977 after receiving a PhD in aeronautics from California Institute of Technology and conducting research at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. An accomplished scientist and inventor, he is credited with developing a number of mathematical theories critical to advancing the state-of-the-art in aerospace structural mechanics including the Blatz-Ko Constitutive Law for hyper-elastic materials, the Ko Flight Structure Aging Theory for fatigue life predictions, and the Ko Displacement Theory for structural shape predictions. The Ko Displacement Theory is currently being used at NASA Dryden to develop sophisticated fiber optic shape sensing technology that could one day give aircraft wings the ability to alter their shape in flight.