Alex Boydston is a Senior Avionics and Software Engineer for the United States (U.S.) Army’s Development Command Aviation & Missile Center (DEVCOM AvMC) Software, Simulation, Systems Engineering and Integration (S3I) Directorate supporting the Program Element Office (PEO) for Aviation at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. Mr. Boydston received his bachelors in electrical engineering in 1992 and masters in electrical engineering in 2001, both from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He has over 30 years of engineering experience in telecommunications, space systems, missile defense, and military aviation. Prior to becoming an engineer, Alex worked as a draftsman for Ladd Engineering, a telecommunications engineering consulting company for rural telecommunications. At Ladd Engineering, he transitioned their work from manual hand drafting to computer aided drafting
(CAD) with a relational database to account for outside plant and central office equipment inventory in their CAD systems. After Ladd Engineering, Alex worked for Teledyne Brown Engineering as a cooperative education student in Advanced Space Programs working various research projects, such as the Thermal Enclosure System (TES) and Protein Crystal Growth (PCG) capabilities, some of which have flown on the Space Shuttle or are flying on the International Space Station (ISS) today. After graduation in 1992, Alex served as a Communication Test Engineer on the National Missile Defense (NMD) Program where he designed and tested data and voice links to support missile testing with Kwajalein Missile Range (KMR), the National Test Facility (NTF) in Colorado, the Kinetic Hardware in the Loop Simulation (KHILS) facility in Florida and Advanced Research Center (ARC) in Huntsville, Alabama. Subsequently to NMD work, he served as an experiment integration engineer on the Space Shuttle Payload Mission System Integration Contract (PMIC), leading integration of experiments for the United States Microgravity Laboratory (USML) and Space Shuttle experiments. Afterwards, Alex transitioned to commercial digital communications industry, working 13 years as an engineer for ADTRAN Incorporated including positions for technical support, product qualification test, and embedded computing design engineering. He also worked for Draper Laboratory as a Flight Computer Architect supporting the Ares I Rocket which was the precursor to the current Space Launch System (SLS). In 2009, Alex began working as an Army Civilian Servant Electronics Engineer as a functional lead for Air Vehicle Management Systems (AVMS). He provided airworthiness assessments on the Iraqi 407, Kiowa Warrior, Blackhawk, Apache, and Chinook platforms. In 2013, he transitioned to the Project Lead for the Architecture Centric Virtual Integration Process (ACVIP), System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) and Authoritative Source of Truth (ASoT) efforts for the Joint Multi-Role (JMR) Science & Technology (S&T) effort in preparation for Future Vertical Lift (FVL) Programs. This led to his current Senior Avionics and Software Engineering position for the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) Program supporting the S&T transition supporting the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) efforts.