Dan Hooks
Advisor
Dan Hooks is an Advisor at Roadrunner, performing analysis of pipeline ideas and technical viability for business development.
He is a highly experienced scientist with a demonstrated history of leading research and building successful research teams, from government to industry to academia. He is skilled in many aspects of materials science and engineering, surface science, surface finishing, coatings development, and soft materials research from explosives to pharmaceuticals.
Dan has been a scientist in the National Laboratory environment in various roles for 24 years. After a post-doc where he worked on a biosensor that was demonstrated to the President and commercialized, he spent ~15 years in explosives research and development. Dan was the founding director of the Explosives center, has been “on loop” at the Bradbury Science Museum in the explosives exhibit he helped develop for more than 10 years, and led the rewrite of the definition of insensitive explosives at the national level for the first time in more than 40 years. He developed the Los Alamos crystal laboratory. He has been focused on electrochemistry, surfaces, and coatings for the past 7 years, completely rebuilding the team and capability for manufacturing research and development in this area. In this role, he led the ground-up renovation of the finishing shop for the first time in 60 years- a facility that scales from molecular level discovery to industrial scale realization. Previous experience in an industrial electroplating facility and evaluation of corrosion behaviors of stainless steels in large-scale food processing provided critical background in leading the renovation.
Dan is an affiliate scientist with the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, performing research centered on scanning probe microscopy on highly diverse projects, from stiffness of vaccine delivery nanoparticles to drug tablet and kidney stone mechanics.
Always keen to translate discoveries to practical utility, he has recently been more focused on intellectual property development and has interfaced through projects with New Mexico companies in the NewSpace Nexus of New Mexico and the New Mexico Small Business Assistance Program.
Actively involved in collaborative and student programs throughout his career, he is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (Geoscience) and formerly at Washington State University (Mechanical and Materials Engineering). He serves on PhD committees at Purdue University (Materials Engineering) and Washington State University (MME). He has been a PhD committee member at Georgetown University (Chemistry) and has had additional collaborations with several other universities. In these capacities, Dan has advised many undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral researchers who have gone on to success in many roles.
Dan has B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Wisconsin and University of Minnesota, respectively, and has >100 publications on a variety of topics with >3000 citations.