Thomas Vaneck

Biography

Thomas Vaneck is the director Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security. Previously, he was vice president and managing director of the Aerovironment Innovation Center New England, where he led the engineering and product development activities for the greater New England area, focused primarily on small, multi-rotor unmanned aircraft systems.

He has broad robotics experience (underwater, air, and space) with particular expertise in miniaturization and biomimetics. Before his time at Aerovironment, he co-founded and led InstantEye Robotics, a division of Physical Sciences Inc., as the vice president of disruptive technologies. Prior to PSI, he was the vice president of research and development at Aurora Flight Sciences where he stood up and ran the Research and Development Center based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He earned his PhD in aerospace engineering (focused on controls engineering) from Stanford University, and his Master of Science in aerospace engineering, Master of Arts in mathematics, and a Bachelor of Science in aerospace engineering from Penn State University. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in the Aerospace Engineering Department and the Sea Grant College Program.