Dr. Alan Cain is recognized for the development of active flow control and its application to acoustic applications such as noise reduction, and control of other complex fluid flows. Prior to founding ITAC and currently serving as its president, Dr. Alan Cain was at The Boeing Company (McDonnell Douglas) for 13 years and served Boeing as an Associate Fellow and Team Leader of Active Flow Control research. Dr. Cain was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Turbulence Research (CTR) (Stanford University & NASA Ames Research Center) and was in residence three periods at the NASA CTR facilities conducting direct simulation studies on different aspects of turbulence. He has also served as a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Research in Scientific Computation at North Carolina State University, and Adjunct Professor of The Dept. of Aerospace Engineering at St. Louis University. His accomplishments have been recognized by many awards including outstanding support for flow control and CFD for Orbital Research, Inc., Boeing Special Incentive Award for contributions to the C-17 Program, Boeing Teammate of Distinction Award for explanation and solution to an aircraft auxiliary inlet fatigue damage problem that was a result of flow/resonant acoustic interaction, McDonnell Douglas Certificate of Customer Appreciation for support of the NASA High Speed Research (HSR) Program, three McDonnell Douglas Leading Edge Awards for Innovative New Concepts, including one that was key to winning a $20 million dollar new wing design contract, and 1996 AIAA Best Paper of the Year Award. Dr. Cain has been the Principal Investigator or Program Manager on over 35 research programs, with funding mostly from the USAF and NASA. Dr. Cain is an inventor on 3 patents and has one more patents pending, authored and co-authored over 100 research papers and has given 20 invited lectures and 12 invited workshop presentations. He is an Associate Fellow of the AIAA and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Aero-acoustics. He has served on the AIAA Aeroacoustics Technical Committee and the AIAA Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee.

Dr. Cain holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan State University. 

Dr. Chris Nelson has extensive experience in the development and application of CFD codes, particularly for unsteady flow applications. Prior to joining ITAC, he worked for 6 years at Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC), eventually becoming AEDC's lead developer on the NPARC Alliance's Wind-US code. In that capacity, he was instrumental in implementing the time-accurate implicit methods currently in the code.  In 1999, Dr. Nelson, as part of the NPARC Alliance development team, received Honorable Mention in the NASA Software of the Year Award competition.  Dr. Nelson has been the Principal Investigator of three research programs with the United States Air Force.  He has also been lead engineer on a number of other NASA and USAF funded efforts.  He is currently involved in a NASA Glenn led project funded by the Air Force “Test and Evaluation Science and Technology” program, entitled “Modeling and Simulation in Support of Test and Evaluation,” which is intended to extend the Wind-US code to be the CFD tool of choice for hypersonic flow simulations.  Dr. Nelson has authored or co-authored more than a dozen scientific papers and presentations.  He is a Senior Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Dr. Nelson holds a Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Mehul manages the creation and growth of advanced technologies for commercial and military applications.  He brings 12+ years of technology innovation, research, and SBIR experience to ITAC.  Prior to joining ITAC, Mr. Patel served as the Director of Aerodynamics Group at Orbital Research Inc., where he led the research, development and product commercialization for the Aerodynamics Division while also managing the Intellectual Property (IP) portfolio related to aerospace technologies.  The success of the Aerodynamics Division led Orbital Research to win the national Tibbetts award in 2007, exemplifying the very best in SBIR achievement.  He has been a Principal Investigator for over 20 SBIR contracts with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense agencies (Air Force, Army, Navy, and DARPA), NASA, and the Department of Energy.  His technical background and areas of interest include applied aerodynamics, active flow control, aircraft/missile aerodynamics, Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) control, MEMS sensors and actuators, plasma actuators, weapons steering (missiles/munitions/projectiles), guided destructive expendables for aircraft self-protection/survivability, and flow-control for smart wind turbine rotor blades.  Mr. Patel is an inventor of 9 U.S. patents with 4 additional patents pending.  He has authored over 65 technical papers, given 9 invited talks, and has received an AIAA Young Professional Best Paper award for his work on "closed-loop missile yaw control via manipulation of forebody flow asymmetries".  Mr. Patel is an Associate Fellow of AIAA, a reviewer for the Journal of Aircraft and AIAA conferences, a past member of the AIAA Applied Aerodynamics Technical Committee, and a current member of the AIAA Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee.

Mr. Patel holds a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University (CASE) and a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU), The Faculty of Technology and Engineering, India.  He is admitted to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) as a registered Patent Agent.