David Yoel is an applied physicist with a distinguished 25 year career as an inventor, systems engineer, field engineer, production manager, international sales and marketing executive, general manager and entrepreneur. His career includes experience with startups, small, medium and large companies across the aerospace and industrial manufacturing industries. This unique range of experiences places him in a unique position to help his clients reach their maximum potential.

In the first phase of his career, Mr. Yoel was a commercial space champion at the Boeing Aerospace Company. He created, designed and managed the development of the Crystals by Vapor Transport Experiment (CVTE) eventually launched aboard Shuttle mission STS-52 in 1992. A follow-on version of CVTE was set to be a permanent facility on the Space Station Laboratory prior to the Columbia accident. Yoel negotiated a commercial launch services agreement with NASA, helped create three NASA/university/industry research consortia to commercialize space, contributed to the design of the Space Station Freedom Laboratory Module and participated in the development and flight of dozens of Shuttle, Station, sounding rocket, and free-flying space experiments and systems.

Mr. Yoel was Founder and President of Insight Scientific Inc. where he created a state-of-the-art line of laboratory equipment based on technology spun out of the space program.

Over the years Mr. Yoel has manufactured systems to melt, refine, debind, sinter, and join high performance materials including metals and alloys, composites, ceramics, glasses, semiconductors, electro-optic crystals and biological materials. He has worked in a wide variety of manufacturing environments as a troubleshooter and consultant. For example, Mr. Yoel helped a US military parts manufacturer rapidly triple production during Operation Desert Storm.

Mr. Yoel has served on several national aerospace technical committees. He strongly supports a variety of student space experiment initiatives, as well as local math and science education programs. He is on the Boards of several companies. Mr. Yoel earned a BS in Physics at Cleveland State University and his MS in Physics at Utah State University, where he lead the team that created the first university student experiments to fly on the Space Shuttle on STS-4 in 1982.
 

Dr. Lanny Herron, COO
Email: lherron@american-aerospace.net

Dr. Herron is a businessman with an outstanding 35 year career in managing and consulting with technical, engineering-related, and general businesses. He holds a BS degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT, an MS in Management from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of South Carolina. Dr. Herron offers AAAI clients consulting services including strategic and organizational planning, financial controls, operations management, composing business plans, and financing of new ventures.

After graduating with his MS from MIT, Dr. Herron first worked in production control, manufacturing and engineering management, and sales management, eventually becoming COO of the largest division of a publicly held U.S. manufacturing company. He then started a number of his own businesses ranging from industrial distribution, to IT, to real estate.

In 1986, Dr. Herron sold many of his business holdings and returned to academia where he achieved the Ph. D. in Business Administration with a major in business strategy and an emphasis on entrepreneurship. His doctoral dissertation won a national award in entrepreneurship and was later published as a book entitled "Do Skills Predict Profits? A Study of Successful Entrepreneurship."

Dr. Herron then spent 16 years at the University of Baltimore where he taught, published, and consulted widely in the areas of business strategy, entrepreneurship, and the commercialization of technology-based businesses. While at UB, Dr. Herron designed the graduate Lab to Market Program and founded and managed the UB Center for Technology Commercialization.