Brien Seeley

About Brien Seeley

Brien Seeley has led two concurrent 40-year careers. One is as a full time eye surgeon and medical leader in Sonoma County, California. The other is as an aircraft builder, pilot and pioneering leader of aviation technology. During his residency in eye surgery at UCSF, he devoted his two-week vacation to earning his pilot’s license, and this began a life-long passion for aviation. He studied aeronautical engineering and helped build 2 experimental homebuilt aircraft. Brien founded the CAFE Foundation in 1981 to host the CAFE 400 flight efficiency prize competitions, which became annual technology prize competitions. Brien presided at CAFE for 34 years of successful aviation research. In 2003, Brien founded the Personal Aircraft Design Academy (PADA), and is a senior member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).In May 2007, Brien conceived and organized the first-ever Electric Aircraft Symposium in San Francisco, going on to serve as its annual Program Chair for 9 years. That same year, Brien designed and wrote the competition rules for the first ever NASA Centennial Challenge for aeronautics. In 2011, he designed and chaired the NASA Green Flight Challenge sponsored by Google, which remains the largest prize ever given for aviation. In 2015, Brien founded the Sustainable Aviation Foundation (SA) in order to advance technologies and innovations pertinent to environmentally friendly, electrically powered aircraft and to help bring forth their implementation into safe, quiet, useful aircraft that can benefit the public. Brien authored the seminal 2015 AIAA paper that conceived Regional Sky Transit as a future transportation system: http://sustainableaviation.org/sky-transit/#rstpapersIn video below: Dr. Brien A Seeley M.D. delivers an invited colloquium on the evolution of transformational flight at Dryden Flight Research Center on August 12 2013. Lecture begins at 3 minutes 15 sec.

Experience

1. President

   Sustainable Aviation Foundation

   Jan 2015 — Present

Education

• University of California, San Francisco - School of Medicine

  Medical Doctor

  1970 — 1974

Skills

• Engineering
• Aerospace
• Aircraft
• Aeronautics
• Systems Engineering
• Composites
• Research
• Management
• Aviation
• Customer Service
• Product Development
• Public Speaking
• Engineering Management
• Manufacturing
• Strategic Planning
• Program Management