Dr. Joel C. Sercel

President and Founder, ICS Associates

Joel C. Sercel, PhD, is President and Founder of ICS Associates Incorporated. Dr. Sercel has 25 years experience developing and utilizing advanced technology to increase cost effectiveness of technical enterprises. He has been an analyst, a technologist, a program manager, a project manager, technological innovator, software developer, a systems engineer, and a successful entrepreneur. In addition to his active management and technical consulting practice Sercel is currently the Technical Director of the Caltech Industrial Relations Center's Systems Engineering Program and a Senior Advisor to the Commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory through the AFRL's Space Vehicles Directorate. Previously he was the Chief Systems Engineer of TSAT, a $22B military satellite system.

During a 17-year career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Sercel worked in diverse areas including space technology development, systems engineering, software development, and management. He led the conception, proposal, and definition of the NSTAR ion propulsion system, the first deep space application of ion propulsion technology to reduce the cost of solar system exploration in the 21st century. Software and processes designed by Dr. Sercel are in use at JPL, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman among many and are credited with having increased team productivity by a factor of four for complex systems engineering tasks such as satellite design and requirements development.

Dr. Sercel has worked with the Advanced Technology Institute, Alliance Space Systems, Boeing, DARPA, ITT Gilfillan, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, NASA, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Systems, Space Systems Loral, TRW, the United States Air Force, United Technologies and various three letter government organizations. He has delivered over 100 invited lectures to Fortune 500 companies and routinely serves on technical and managerial review boards for space mission projects and advanced technology programs. Sercel presently has patents pending in the areas of software search technology, software security, and robotics. He has also received six awards from NASA for intentions in diverse areas including databases to support space mission projects, focusing systems for plasma beams, engineering team productivity tools, and advanced space propulsion technologies.

Dr. Sercel received his PhD and master's degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology with a doctoral dissertation plasma physics as applied to space propulsion. He earned his degree in Engineering Physics from the University of Arizona. Dr. Sercel is a certified consultant to the Department of Defense.