Umesh Ketkar

Umesh Ketkar has more than 30 years of aerospace industry experience including a long history of mentorship, empowerment, & successful leadership of large diverse organizations, with a focus on high technology engineering projects.

His LMU work includes both teaching and research. He currently teaches the following classes here at LMU: Spacecraft Design, Advanced Program Management, Lean Management, Occupy Mars, Engineering Economics, Science in Science Fiction, and Systems Engineering Integrative Project. Leading LMU efforts to initiate an on-campus, student-run Cubesat development & operations lab. He brings his advanced spacecraft design expertise and advanced technology organization into our LMU classrooms.

In addition, he is the founder and leader of a social justice organization in Los Angeles' South Bay. The 900-member organization focused on improving democratic processes, increasing voter participation, and making government at all levels more responsive to community needs and interests.

HIs industry expertise expands from programmatic & technical leadership for development of space-based environmental monitoring systems & electro-optical imaging technologies (IESE Solution/Raytheon) to Mechanical Engineering (Hughes).

Prior to teaching at LMU, Umesh was the director of National Space Communications Programs (Boeing) leading family of major Space Systems programs (>500 people, over $250M annual revenue). Activities performed included: advanced technology development, evolutionary design, development of a new modular multi-mission spacecraft bus, multiple communications payloads, and long-term sustaining operations.

Adding on to that, he led program & customer team through transition from legacy systems to modern product lines and commercial-like processes, resulting in streamlined program, schedule acceleration, cost reductions, and improved customer satisfaction.

Early in his career, Umesh coordinated major engineering efforts spanning multiple government agencies, which resulted in addition of significant new mission capabilities to program, while simultaneously streamlining activities into a fixed-price commercial-like model.