Dr. James Casler will be the Acting Chair of Space Studies During Fall 2015

Dr. James Casler, Associate Professor, Department of Space Studies, will be the Acting Chair of the department in fall 2015, while Dr. Santhosh Seelan is on sabbatical leave.

Dr. Casler, a former Marine Corps Test Pilot and an Aerospace Engineer, joined UND in 2007. He is a graduate of the Navy’s Test Pilot School and spent over 10 years directly involved in flight testing new aircraft and systems for the Marine Corps. More recently, before joining UND, for 11 years he has held various engineering and management positions with what has become the Aerospace Group, Wyle Laboratories. For five of those years, he was the Senior Business Development Manager for Research and Development and was actively engaged in strategic planning and business development efforts oriented to new markets in aeronautical and aerospace research and development, primarily in the NASA engineering and technical services arena.

A student of space colonization since the mid-1980’s, Dr. Casler did his doctoral research in human performance in space-based manufacturing settings and he continues to investigate future industrial, e.g., mining and manufacturing, operations on the surfaces of the Moon and Mars.