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A man on a mission

“If I’m doing anything to change the world,” says retired NASA administrator Julian Earls (PMD 37, 1979), “it is using any power and influence I have to lift up other people.” He has done that by helping others to further their potential through education.
For 30 years, Earls taught classes in math and physics at Cleveland community colleges at night while his career took off at the space agency’s Glenn Research Center during the day.
“I felt such an obligation to those teachers who had helped me, and one way I could pay them back would be to do what they had done for me,” he says. “But I also used my teaching as a recruiting vehicle for NASA, to inspire bright students out of high school to go into our apprenticeship program.”
Since retiring, the indefatigable Earls has taught college-level ethics courses, launched a K–12 program that offers Mandarin in kindergarten, led a project that gives high school juniors and seniors interested in STEM subjects an early immersion in the college environment, and helped an organization win a $5 million grant to promote entrepreneurship to high school students.
“It’s an opportunity to marry technical disciplines with entrepreneurial spirit,” says Earls. “The future of this nation will require technical skills and the thinking of entrepreneurs.”
(Published October 2014)
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