Thomas P. Filburn

Dr. Thomas Filburn earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1980, M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Chemical Engineering in 1986 and 2001, respectively, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 2003, all from the University of Connecticut. He worked for ten years in the energy industry in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. He has over 16 years of experience working in the aerospace industry, including 12 years as a researcher in the Space Group at Hamilton Standard.

Dr. Filburn taught full-time for 12 years in the mechanical engineering department at the University of Hartford, primarily in the area of thermal-fluids. He has numerous publications and conference proceedings on a variety of research topics. He holds eight U.S. patents and co-authored a chapter in the Biomedical Engineering and Design Handbook on Enclosed Life Support (McGraw-Hill 2009).

His seminal patent for a solid amine CO2 scrubber is planned to operate with both NASA’s Orion capsule and the next generation space suit. He co-authored a book on the three most famous nuclear power accidents and the history of their reactor development (TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima, Curse of the Nuclear Genie, Springer 2016). He has recently authored a second book, Commercial Jet Aircraft and the Sub-systems that Make it Possible (Springer, February 2019).

For the past four-and-a-half years, he has worked at UTC, initially for UTRC and currently with the Materials and Process Engineering (MPE) Group at Pratt & Whitney. In this role, he works as a liaison between the MPE Group and the module centers within P&W.