Alumni Spotlight with Kendra Sharp

Join the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Women in Aerospace for an engaging career talk with Kendra Sharp (BS '93), Dean of the School of Engineering at Santa Clara University and the department's 2026 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient. From aerospace engineering to academia, national science policy, and university leadership, Sharp has built a career by embracing new opportunities and pursuing work with meaningful impact. She will share lessons from her unique professional journey, discuss how engineers can lead across disciplines, and explore the important role of engineering and AI in creating a more humane, just, and sustainable world. Whether you're planning your first job or your next career move, you'll leave inspired to think broadly about where an engineering degree can take you. 

Aerospace Engineering students, faculty and staff should register here.
Guests from outside the AE department should register here.

BIO: Dr. Sharp is the Dean of the School of Engineering at Santa Clara University (SCU), a Jesuit institution located in the heart of Silicon Valley. She is leading the effort to launch the new Cunningham Shoquist Center for Applied AI and Human Potential, building upon SCU’s current AI expertise, faculty, and industry connections.

As Dean, she is especially focused on evolving SCU’s graduate programs, supporting faculty in the development of university-industry partnerships, and growing research and other experiential learning opportunities. Sharp enjoys external service related to policy, university-industry partnerships, and AI, for example as an international expert for the Government of the United Kingdom’s multi-year Research Excellence Framework (REF) effort, or as a Senior Adviser to the inaugural AI & National Security Convergence Fellowship through the Council on Strategic Risks.

From 2021 to 2025, she was the Head of the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE) at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), a $9B federal agency. Under her leadership, NSF/OISE doubled the number of bilateral joint funding opportunities with foreign governments and developed the new multilateral Global Centers funding program, with a combined international investment of $76M from four country partners in 2023 and $82M from six country partners in 2024. She served on the Board of Governors of the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation and on the Bureau of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Global Science Forum. She routinely supported White House initiatives on international science and technology via the White House National Security Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy, and was a member of the 2024 Women’s Global Leadership Program cohort at the Center for International and Security Studies.

She was a faculty member in mechanical engineering at Oregon State University (OSU) for fifteen years where she founded and directed OSU’s humanitarian engineering program. She held the Evans Professorship of Humanitarian Engineering from 2015 to 2020. She has extensive experience in international research and education in the Netherlands, Pakistan, India, and New Zealand, among other countries. Further, at OSU, she served as the Senior Advisor for Global Affairs and as Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Development. In 2018, she was awarded the ASME Edwin F. Church Medal for eminent service to mechanical engineering education. She was also awarded OSU’s International Service Award and OSU College of Engineering’s Faculty Mentoring Award. Prior to OSU, she was a faculty member in mechanical engineering at Penn State University for 8 years, and an American Association for the Advancement of Science/American Institute of Physics Congressional Science Fellow in the Office of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman.

She received her Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), an M.Eng. from the University of California – Berkeley, an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge (UK), and a B.S. in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering at UIUC. This year, she received (separate) Distinguished Alum awards from both the Mechanical Science and Engineering and Aerospace Engineering departments at UIUC. She is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.