College of Engineering Signatures

Some of Dava Newman’s (B.S., AME ’86) fondest memories of her life as a Notre Dame engineering student are similar to those of any other college student. She remembers the dorms, her fellow students, discussions about life and death, and contemplating if there ever could be a “just war.”

She remembers sports. Newman was a member of the women’s varsity basketball team and coached high school girls’ basketball at a local school her last two years at Notre Dame.

She also remembers two of the faculty — Rev. John Dunne, C.S.C., The Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Catholic Theology, and Professor A. Murty Kanury, who was at that time in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, and how they inspired her career.

Today, Newman is a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also serves as director of the Technology and Policy Program. When she came to the University, she thought engineering would be a challenging major and teach her how to be a problem solver. And, she was looking forward to the combination of liberal arts with technical courses that Notre Dame offered.

Newman arrived on campus 10 years after the University first admitted women. “It was great to be a woman in engineering,” she says. “My best friend was the only other woman aerospace engineer in our class of 40. We had wonderful male colleagues and benefitted from close teamwork and academic support from a group of about six students.”

Engineering became a way of life for her: thinking, learning, designing, analyzing, and building, which are all things she strives to pass along to her undergraduate and graduate students. According to Newman, the most important thing is that everyone needs to contribute to solving the world’s challenges, which are technical, cultural, and political in nature. “Engineers are essential to the solutions,” she says.

In addition to her classroom duties and research activities, Newman is deeply committed to outreach and education for K-12 students. In fact, she is a NASA Solar System Ambassador, an honor she received as part of an international outreach educational effort, the Galatea Odyssey Mission.

Most recently, her research has taken another “giant leap.” Newman has designed a skintight space suit that exerts a force on the wearer’s body to protect it from the vacuum in space rather than using gas pressurization. She believes it could be ready to fly in about 10 years, in time for a manned mission to Mars.

The new spandex and nylon BioSuit designed by MIT’s Professor Dava Newman, a Notre Dame alumna, is much less bulky than the standard, gas-pressurized space suit that was designed 40 years ago and currently weighs in at about 300 lbs. Newman’s sleeker suit, which fits like a second skin, offers much greater mobility and better protection from punctures and decompression.