Paul Bevilaqua

Paul Michael Bevilaqua, born in 1945, is an aeronautics engineer at Lockheed Martin in California. He studied aerospace engineering at the University of Notre Dame and took a doctorate at Purdue University in 1973, then worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where he became deputy director of the Energy Conversion Laboratory, managed by the jet engine inventor Hans von Ohain. After Rockwell International he became chief aeronautical scientist at Lockheed in 1985. In 1990 he invented the shaft-driven lift fan for the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter together with fellow Skunk Works engineer Paul Shumpert, a way to combine supersonic flight with vertical landing that carried the X-35B and F-35B through the Joint Strike Fighter program. He received the Paul E. Haueter Memorial Award in 2004 and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2005.