Boeing Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer John J. Tracy to Deliver 2009 Commencement Address

May 15, 2009

By UCLA Samueli Newsroom

John J. Tracy, senior vice president of Engineering, Operations & Technology and chief technology officer for The Boeing Company, will address the 2009 graduates of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science as this year’s commencement speaker.

About 1,000 bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and PhD candidates will take part in the ceremony, scheduled at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 13 in UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion.

At Boeing, Tracy is responsible for defining and implementing corporate strategies for attaining and maintaining technical and functional excellence and enhancing the yield of technology investments across the enterprise.

In addition to serving on the company’s Executive Council, he provides strategic direction to several functions and business organizations comprising more than 100,000 Boeing employees. These include the Engineering, Operations, Supplier Management and Quality Assurance functions, along with the Information Technology, Phantom Works, Intellectual Property Management, and Environment, Health and Safety organizations. He also oversees the development and implementation of the enterprise technology investment strategy; sponsors Boeing’s Development Process Excellence initiative; and ensures integration of all four of Boeing’s enterprise initiatives.

Previously Tracy was vice president of Engineering & Mission Assurance for Boeing Integrated Defense Systems. Tracy had functional management responsibility for the IDS engineering processes, engineering tools, and the 32,000-person engineering team. Prior to this assignment, Tracy was vice president of Structural Technologies, Prototyping, and Quality for the Boeing Phantom Works advanced R&D unit, where he was responsible for advanced materials and processes, structural design and analysis, manufacturing technology, prototype development, and the Phantom Works Quality function.

Tracy has also served as the general manager of Engineering for Boeing Military Aircraft and Missiles in Southern California, the director of the Space and Communications Advanced Engineering organization, the director of Operations Management, and director of Structures Technology for Southern California Phantom Works. He joined McDonnell Douglas in 1981 as a stress analyst at the Huntington Beach facility.

Tracy is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the past chair of the ASME 6,000-member Aerospace Division. He has also been elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the Royal Aeronautical Society, and was named the 2006 Hispanic Engineer of the Year by the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Corporation (HENAAC).

He has served as an editorial board member for the AIAA Journal, the Journal of Thin-Walled Structures, and the Journal of Computer Modeling and Simulation in Engineering. He has authored 26 publications in the areas of composite structural mechanics, launch vehicle structures, smart structures, and aging aircraft.

Tracy received a PhD in engineering in 1987 from UC Irvine, and an master’s and bachelor’s in physics from Cal State Los Angeles (1981) and Cal State Dominguez Hills (1976), respectively.
Tracy and his wife, Kathy, have two grown children, Scott and Wendy.

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