Wednesday April 9, 2025
Bart Kemper, P.E., DFE
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Kemper Engineering Services
Keynote Title: Innovation, Ethics, and spreading the word of VVUQ
Biography: Bart Kemper, P.E., DFE is a Louisiana-based engineer with over 30 years of international engineering in a wide range of industries. He primarily works with equipment and equipment systems using his mechanical engineering degree from Louisiana State University as well as working in civil engineering through his training and education as an officer in the US Army Corps of Engineers. He is the principal engineer at Kemper Engineering Services and an engineering researcher at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. During the past decade he has become increasingly active in the engineering use of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Kemper is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), and the National Academy of Forensic Engineers (NAFE). Kemper is a licensed Professional Engineer in the United States and internationally and is a board-certified forensic engineer. Retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel after 32 years of Active and Reserve service, enlisted and officer, his military technical areas included construction, pipelines, bridges, tunnels, forensic post-blast assessments, infrastructure assessment & development as well as traditional combat engineer roles. He has over 40 professional publications, is a peer reviewer for multiple publications, and is the former Editor in Chief for the Journal of the National Academy of Forensic Engineers. Kemper is a member of multiple Codes & Standards committees, including ASME Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (PVHO); ASTM E54 Committee on Homeland Security Applications; and ASME Verification, Validation, and Uncertainty Quantification (VVUQ) subcommittees Solid Mechanics (VVUQ10) and Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence (VVUQ70). Kemper has served on multiple policy committees for NSPE responding to Congressional inquiries on technical matters, resulting in the Systems Software Integrator program being developed by NICET. At the request of the US Coast Guard, he led a pro-bono multi-discipline team to investigate the engineering aspects of OceanGate and the Titan Submersible implosion.
Thursday April 10, 2025
Dr. Chris Roy
Professor, Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering
Virginia Tech
Keynote Title: The VT-NASA CFD Turbulence Model Validation Challenge
Biography: Dr. Chris Roy received his PhD in Aerospace Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1998. After spending 5 years as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, he moved to academia and is currently a full professor in the Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech. Dr. Roy has authored or co-authored over 200 books, book chapters, journal articles, and conference papers in the areas of computational fluid dynamics, verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification. He is the co-author of the second edition book Verification, Validation, and Uncertainty Quantification in Scientific Computing published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.