Year Inducted: 2020
Michael Johns has helped spark innovation in critical areas that improves society and keeps Birmingham and the state of Alabama at the forefront of engineering and science research.
Through his work at Southern Research Institute as vice president of the engineering division, Johns has grown annual revenue to more than $25 million in research volume for a division that employs more than 100 engineers, scientists and support staff. He has directed and managed high-profile research and commercial projects and has been a strong advocate for the key technologies the country needs to develop.
He graduated from The University of Alabama in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and would later earn his MBA from UA in 2005. He began his career with Southern Research as a cooperative education student, joining it full time as a materials engineer after graduation.
Based in Birmingham, Southern Research is an independent, nonprofit, scientific research organization with more than 430 scientists and engineers supporting the pharmaceutical,
biotechnology, defense, aerospace, environmental, and energy industries with laboratories and offices in Alabama, Maryland, Georgia and Texas.
Johns now leads teams of researchers working in electromechanical systems and integration, aerospace engineering, hypersonic materials and structures, materials engineering, automotive engineering, directed energy, additive manufacturing, cybersecurity, and computational sciences. He is also overseeing expansion into the Huntsville, Washington D.C. and Houston markets, and has previously served as director of government affairs.
Prior to his appointment as vice president of engineering, Johns served as the director of the transportation systems division responsible for new automotive technology development in areas of manufacturing failure analysis, vehicle dynamics, environmental simulation and accelerated life testing. From 1999 to 2003, Johns led the materials characterization group and was responsible for materials research programs for NASA and the United States Department of Defense, as well as new emerging areas in automotive research in the Southeast. He began his career as a materials engineer researching the areas of thermal and thermal-structural behavior of materials, specializing in characterizing carbon, silica, glass and ceramic matrix composites for propulsion and atmospheric re-entry systems.
As vice president of engineering, Johns has focused on technology excellence and diversification including the launch of the Carbon-to-Liquids Development Center, the Water Research Center, the Southeast Solar Research Center, expansion into offensive and defensive hypersonic systems, airborne intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, and advanced manufacturing technologies.
Johns has been dedicated to Alabama. He has formed collaborative university teams for research, especially in automotive and aerospace applications and played a leading role in establishing the Society of Automotive Engineers Alabama Section that has helped grow the automotive industry in the state.
Johns serves as a member of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) Technology, Innovation & Engineering (TI&E) Committee since 2014, which is the national advisory committee for all technology research programs within NASA. He is an active member of engineering leadership boards at UA and the University of Alabama at Birmingham and also serves on the mechanical engineering advisory boards of UA and UAB, the Science and Technology Honors Program board at UAB, the STEM Path to the MBA board at UA, and serves on the president’s council at the University
of Alabama at Huntsville. He was named Engineer of the Year by the Engineering Council of Birmingham in 2016.
