Neal McCollom, Ph.D.
(Deceased)
Dr. Neal McCollom was an Adjunct Professor with ISME and, until 2016, was a full-time employee of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Fort Worth. Dr. McCollom received his MS degree in IEM in 1974, and a PhD from Texas A&M in 1981. Between 1974 and 1981, he worked at Ethyl Corporation, Pasadena, TX. After his PhD, he also taught at the University of Missouri.
At Lockheed Martin, he held the position of Technical Lead for the F-35 Anomaly and Failure Resolution System, the system that the maintainers use to resolve faults on the F-35. He was also the Aeronautics Lead for the Off-Board Prognostics and Health Management system which manages the health reporting data coming off the aircraft after each flight. He has been involved in 'aircraft health' for the last 10 years and earned the title of Lockheed Martin Fellow in 2008 - an honor reserved for the top 0.75% of the technical staff of the Lockheed Martin Corporation. He was co-chair of the corporate Sustainment Fellows Action Team. Previously, he managed Internal Research and Development projects examining the impact of events on the sustainment of the entire fleet of Lockheed Martin aircraft.
Neal also led the development and process to perform System Engineering Technical Reviews for the Autonomic Logistics Global Sustainment (ALGS) organization which provided a structured Systems Engineering approach to the development of the Aeronautics systems and products. He was the Prognistics and Health Management integrator between ALGS and the Air Vehicle integrated product team. Dr. McCollom was the Knowledge Based Systems lead for the Virtual Product Development Initiative, which developed new and improved engineering tools to better support the F-35. Dr. McCollom has also worked in the F-22 program helping to define the delivery of digital design data, and supported multiple manufacturing systems efforts in inventory control, shop floor scheduling, and simulation. He led the corporate Artificial Intelligence Working Group for two years, culminating in an internal AI conference across multiple divisions of the corporation.
Dr. McCollom was a registered Professional Engineer in Texas, and was an Adjunct Professor for the Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering department at UTA and served on their Industrial Advisory Board.