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Figure 1. During a reception at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., John H. Hopps, Jr., (right) the U.S. Department of Defense’s deputy director of Defense Research and Engineering and deputy undersecretary of Defense for Laboratories and Basic Sciences, accepts the Federation of Materials Societies (FMS) National Materials Advancement Award from Iver Anderson, (left), senior metallurgist with the Metal and Ceramic Sciences Program at Ames Laboratory, adjunct professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Iowa State University, TMS member, and president of FMS.

In December, the Federation of Materials Societies presented the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) John H. Hopps, Jr., with the 2003 National Materials Advancement Award (Figure 1). The award recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding capabilities in advancing the effective and economic use of materials and the multi-disciplinary field of materials science and engineering generally, and who contribute to the application of the materials profession to national problems and policy.

Hopps is a physicist by training who serves dual roles within the DoD’s Defense Research and Engineering Division, serving as the deputy director of Defense Research and Engineering and as the deputy undersecretary of Defense for Laboratories and Basic Sciences. Hopps has broad responsibility for research and education programs in science and engineering disciplines, and his duties include oversight of the defense laboratories, improvement of the defense laboratory science and engineering workforce, and direction of Defense Research and Engineering university-based basic research, instrumentation, graduate fellowship, and education programs in the science and engineering disciplines. He has additional responsibility for international programs of technical cooperation between the United States and its allies. Hopps has long been a vocal advocate for taking an interdisciplinary approach to developing the technical workforce and exploring the frontiers of research, particularly in materials science and engineering.

While Hopps began his studies in plasma physics and condensed matter theory, his technical expertise evolved over the years to include work in such areas as semiconductors and electronic materials. His duties have included overseeing research and development activities in high-performance fiber-optic components, integrated optics components, laser devices, semiconductor photonic devices, photonics fabrication automation and packaging, and optical signal processing.

The journal recently spoke with Hopps about issues that affect both his work at the Defense Research and Engineering office and the materials community as a whole.

Q. How do you balance the roles of being both a scientist and an administrator?

A. There is no real connection between my particular field and my job, even though it’s really quite useful. Materials is interdisciplinary, and that broader spectrum gives me insight into many more things. But in terms of the balance, I am not currently active in research.

Q. Does having a technical background give you an advantage in determining the types of technology research programs that are most worthy of funding?

A. Absolutely. It is absolutely essential. Even though I don’t personally determine what all of the programs are, I do have oversight and approval authority. Sometimes I will see things that are not right or have gaps, so it is important to be able to recognize those kinds of things and inject your own ideas. But this is not the norm. This is really more the exception.

Q. What role will materials science—and science and engineering in general—play in the future of the U.S. defense program?

A. Science and technology will be a major driver for transformation. It is increasingly important in the kind of threat environment that we are in to have as many options as we possibly can. Science and engineering and new technologies open the operational space for the war fighters. When we have a wider range of technologies to draw upon, we are more apt to be able to quickly react to and solve a lot of the problems that we encounter that we had not previously anticipated.

From the very front end of basic research through that whole technology chain, it is becoming increasingly important to have a wide array of options when you neck down to war fighter requirements and you need to react to something quickly. So science and engineering is absolutely critical to the way that defense will be structured in the future. The tech base is important, and I think there is another factor, which makes basic research increasingly important.

In the context of globalization, there are an awful lot of very smart people all over the world. We are no longer the science and engineering epicenter, and we have to be very conscious of that and make sure that we keep pace with countries that are emerging rapidly in science and engineering.

Q. What do you think is the future of materials education and the science and engineering workforce in the United States?

A. Materials education is going to be around a long while. The field is critical, and materials are important. From an educational standpoint, materials is not really a discipline, it is a multi-discipline. It is able to integrate a lot of concepts from various disciplines. So not only is it important in itself, but the learning paradigm that goes on in materials is also important.

Looking towards the future, the science and engineering workforce issue is probably our number one national security issue. The intellectual capital that is emerging in other parts of the world means that there will be people who will be extremely competitive. Many of them do not have the industrial infrastructures at this point, but we have to be concerned at the number of very smart people showing up in so many other places.

Q. How do you think the events of September 11 have changed the materials community and its role in national policy?

A. I don’t think that they really have. Materials have always been critical to defense. Prior to September 11th, the DoD was on a path to transformation. We fully understood the potential of the asymmetric threat—like you saw in the terrorist attacks. There were plans evolving and developing, programs being put in place in the context of transformation, to deal with some of these things which had been previously identified in defense department documents. All of these things were anticipated. I guess what September 11th really did is greatly accelerate the pace at which we were pursuing some of these programs. So, the kinds of things that we are doing, the kinds of needs that we are seeing, were, in fact, anticipated. We knew which way the world was moving.

Q. How has the increased emphasis on national security and defense affected publishing of technical research? Has the DoD become more restrictive in what it allows to be published?

A. No. We went through a major review that was coordinated through the whole department. The DoD decided that it did not need to support any changes in the existing guidelines. If the work was not classified, it could be published. This is the stance specifically for academia. Of course, in our own facilities, it is possible that there could be decisions to control information more closely. But this does not affect the academic community where there were a lot of concerns about the ability to publish. For them, there are no restrictions after the fact.

Q. With the recent promises of increased investment in the U.S. space program, what do you think about the benefits of the program?

A. I think we need to be careful and understand that the U.S. space program is not the NASA program. The DoD also has a major investment in space. One of our goals is to be dominant in any arena, in any environment in which military operations may need to be conducted. Not only does that include ground, sea, and air, it also includes space. We have to ensure that our capability in space for all kinds of systems exceeds that of any potential adversary. That is a major interest for us. Whereas I don’t really know many details of the new NASA program, I would say it would be important for NASA to work with the DoD so that we take advantage of the technological synergies that we have. There is really an opportunity for collaboration. If we do collaborate, we can do things with significant improvements in cost. Even though the missions are different, we both need to get to space, and we need to be able to get there fairly quickly and often. There is a lot of commonality, and if we build the right kind of synergy into the activities, we can probably reduce the cost and increase the benefits of the overall U.S. space program.