Dr. Bobby Bishop ’79, P.E. serves as the vice chancellor and dean of the Texas A&M University College of Engineering and director of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station. He holds the Harold J. Haynes Dean’s Chair in Engineering.

Bishop graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in aerospace engineering from Texas A&M. While at Texas A&M, Bishop was selected to be a co-operative engineering student at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. He went on to earn his doctorate in electrical and computer engineering at Rice University. He began his professional career as an engineer at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory focusing on guidance and navigation systems and serving as an on-site resident at the NASA Johnson Space Center.

He ultimately entered academia as a faculty member at The University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, where he later served as department chair. Bishop also served as dean of engineering at Marquette University and at the University of South Florida before returning to Texas A&M. An entrepreneurial-minded academic leader, Bishop founded the Institute of Applied Engineering at the University of South Florida as a research and education center of excellence dedicated to seeking solutions to the security and economic challenges facing the nation. As the founding CEO and President, he oversaw an organization that was awarded well over $100M in contracts.

As an active researcher and scholar, Bishop is a specialist in the area of systems theory, guidance and control of spacecraft, and navigation and estimation theory with applications across a broad range of aerospace challenges with a special interest in small satellites and planetary exploration. Dr. Bishop co-authors one of the world’s leading textbooks in control theory, and has authored two other textbooks, edited two handbooks, and authored/co-authored over one hundred and fifty journal and conference papers. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Astronautical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of the Pan American Academy of Engineering.