Alan D. Wilks, Ph.D.

Senior Director

Dr. Wilks is an Analytical Chemist who consults in the areas of industrial chemistry. He is well versed in instrumentation, analysis, manufacturing process optimization and safety-related topics. Dr. Wilks has worked extensively in catalysis and petrochemical processing; he has over 25 years of specific research and development activities in these fields.

Dr. Wilks rejoined Packer Engineering after successfully founding and nurturing a startup company (SmartSignal Corporation) onto a path to success, having left Packer Engineering for that specific purpose in 1997. Dr. Wilks originally joined Packer Engineering in 1994, after a successful career at Honeywell International and its predecessors (Universal Oil Products, UOP, The Signal Companies and AlliedSignal) where he last served as their Vice President, Research and Technology. In that position he oversaw research programs for essentially all the major business units of Allied Signal, supervised professionals in two Corporate Laboratories (Des Plaines, IL and Morristown, NJ), and sat on the board that quarterly reviewed and recommended actions on outstanding IP issues. Dr. Wilks was a member of the 125 person Senior Executive Group of AlliedSignal which met biannually to chart future directions for the company, and he also served on the AlliedSignal Engineering Council, a group of senior technologists responsible for oversight of technology development issues within the corporation. He has provided leadership to a broad spectrum of programs involving catalysis, surface science, polymer chemistry, ceramics, instrumentation, materials characterization and pilot plant operations. Among his technical accomplishments is the leadership of the research team that evaluated and recommended the "Materials-by-Design" approach to chemistry and materials science. This program, funded through the U.S. Department of Energy, is a key element leading to today's ubiquitous integration of modern computational tools into chemical research.

He presently serves as a member of the Advisory Board of the Maintenance and Reliability Center of the University of Tennessee. He has served as a member of the panel that annually reviewed the Materials Science and Technology Department at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has seven issued US Patents, several others submitted, and has authored numerous technical articles. He continues to serve the technical community as a presenter of technical findings and an organizer/session chair for conferences such as the annual MARCON (Maintenance and Reliability Conference).