Mechanical engineering professor Dr. David Jack and his award-winning research team’s work has become one of the most trusted resources for some of the world’s largest equipment manufacturers: Lockheed Martin Corporation and Volkswagen, as well as NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense.
Specializing in physics-based constitutive modeling (how materials behave), composites characterization (how they’re made), and non-destructive testing and inspection (checking for hidden flaws without damaging them), he’s written more than 150 articles, earned 12 Federal Aviation Administration safety certifications, and holds more than 25 patents across the field of materials science engineering.
It’s no small feat for the graduate program director of materials science and engineering. But it’s all still surprising for the young homeschooled 20-year-old Jack who, back in 1997, never intended to enter higher education.
“I was working with a wonderful lady, and she made a bet with me that if I lost, I’d fill in an application form to go to college,” Jack said. “Of course, I lost. I spoke to an admissions officer who told me he was concerned I wouldn’t be successful because I didn’t have a typical educational background. I believe now that he knew exactly what I needed to hear. I felt challenged to prove him wrong.”
Attending the Colorado School of Mines, he canvassed his fellow students at the engineering-exclusive school to hear what they thought the hardest major was. He got two strong opinions: mechanical engineering and engineering physics. Jack decided to take on both.
With two degrees under his belt, Jack attended the University of Missouri, where he earned a master’s and doctorate in mechanical and aerospace engineering, and in his spare time earned a master’s in applied mathematics.
“My mentor there was Dr. Douglas Smith, who had actually taught my junior-level machine design course in Colorado,” Jack said. “I’m happy to report he’s now part of the Baylor faculty.”
Finding his true vocation
Jack joined the faculty at Florida State University in Tallahassee, working at the High-Performance Materials Institute. But after two years, he realized he was not where he was supposed to be and began evaluating offers from larger R1 universities and major original equipment manufacturers. And that’s when he realized his true vocation.
“I love teaching, and so I started looking for a position at a four-year teaching-only school, but nothing was what I wanted until I saw a job posting that simply said, ‘Baylor University is a Christian university seeking Christian engineering faculty,’” Jack said. “I got my application in minutes before the deadline and, with some divine help, I got the job.”
Jack’s lab resides in the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative (BRIC), which boasts more than 300,000 square feet of laboratory space, research centers, and space for industry partnerships.
“I am blessed to manage about 12,000 square feet of that facility,” Jack said.
Within the BRIC, Jack and his team established the Materials Testing and Characterization Core. He was able to leverage the equipment acquired over the past decade and a half to establish a facility that serves the entire university, the local community, and multiple industry partners.
“It is one of the few ISO 17025-accredited test labs at a university in Texas,” Jack said. “We provide testing services to multiple industry partners. Turn that around, and you have students being taught on some of today’s most expensive, cutting-edge scientific equipment. I know of students who have been hired simply on the basis that they’re familiar with the test equipment we use.”
A day in the life…
A typical day for Jack begins in his office, where he finds a line of students awaiting him daily.
“People tease me because when I show up there are so many students outside the door that I have a sign on my door telling people when I’m not available,” he said with a laugh. “I’m advising nine Ph.D. students, a couple of master’s students, and four undergraduate students in their active research. But as graduate program director for materials science engineering and also mechanical engineering, there are 85 graduate students in those two programs combined, of which almost 60 are pursuing their Ph.D.”
Jack also gets to do what makes him most fulfilled: Teach.
“I am blessed in that I pretty much get to pick what class I want to teach because those are the classes no one else wants to teach,” he explained. “I like the hardest classes, the most math-intensive, the deepest physics.”
Baylor’s Materials Science Lab is best known for constitutive modeling of contemporary composite processes, rigid and flexible suspension dynamics, and mechanics-based modeling of contemporary composite products. His research also includes conductivity analysis of carbon nanotube networks for high-current applications, non-destructive evaluation of composites using ultrasonic techniques, and large-scale simulations of oil well casings with spatial and temporal properties.
“I get to break things, blow them up and burn them, and then smash them. But I get to say, ‘Look, it’s science, and I’m learning how this thing works!’” Jack explained. “I started off looking at car parts, asking myself, ‘How do you model how car parts are made so that, within a commercial manufacturing process, they can be made better? To make them lighter, stronger, and safer.’ Of course, that’s exploded, figuratively, into aerospace, sporting goods, the rail industry… even the Ziploc bags in your kitchen and the golf club you’re swinging out on the range. We’ve touched them all, working on projects that helped make them better.”
The rewards of great research
The work in the Materials Science Lab does not go unnoticed. Two Baylor students, Ryan Hatmaker and Clayton Hearn, won the People’s Choice Award in the process innovation-prototype category at the SPE Automotive Composites Conference and Exhibition in early September 2025. Together, they developed an interior door handle bezel for the Volkswagen ID.4 entirely from sustainable materials, such as paper-waste composites.
“The awards are great for students,” Jack enthused. “You go to a conference, and there are hundreds of people there, and you’re on stage hearing that you got No. 1 something. I mean, you’re competing against established companies! As far as we know, this was the first time a paper-based interior component was used in a commercial automotive product, and it represents a potential for huge cost reduction and a massive supply-chain benefit. This material is not just going to be available in Texas, but in every major city in the world.”
Jack is currently involved in research for Lockheed Martin, working with Missiles and Fire Control to identify ways to qualify manufacturing processes. He’s also done some work with NASA, in one case helping the team there realize that one of its standard tests was actually damaging the structure of the item being evaluated. Working with many different aerospace partners, his research teams have worked on everything from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to Boeing 747s. To end his very abbreviated list of accomplishments, Jack adds proudly that they also worked on the bicycles used in the Tour de France.
It’s all about teaching the students
Awards aside, Jack has a lot of time and energy for the students he supervises and teaches.
“They’re all just brilliant, and I have to put my pride to one side sometimes because I realize some of my students can outdo me in some areas,” he said. “They have incredibly high integrity, love to work, and are just intensely curious. Their job is to create the new, and if you’re not curious, you can’t even begin to think what the new might be.
“There are students in the lab today who are working on problems that a month ago they had no idea existed,” he added.
As Jack looks to the future, his response is just as humble and playful as ever: “I’m going to get older. My kids are going to go to college. But when it comes to research, I can’t see more than about six months or a year ahead. But I know it’s going to be really fun.”
He pauses and adds, “I have dreams of what I think it’s going to be, but I’m almost always wrong. And so, we’re just having fun seeing where it goes. We have some cool ideas and some very interesting irons in the fire.
“When I came to Baylor in 2009, research expenditures were much less than $100K per year,” Jack said. “We’re going to be hitting $6 million this year as a department. It’s a very different world.”
