4/30/2026 Debra Levey Larson
After earning her B.S. in aerospace engineering in 1993, Kendra Sharp didn’t have a rigid master plan in place for her future. Instead, she made career decisions based on what she was good at and what she enjoyed doing in either academia or policy. Her professional resume includes faculty and leadership positions at three universities, two stints in government policy and this year, being named AE’s 2026 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient.
Written by Debra Levey Larson
After earning her B.S. in aerospace engineering in 1993, Kendra Sharp didn’t have a rigid master plan in place for her future. Instead, she made career decisions based on what she was good at and what she enjoyed doing in either academia or policy. Her professional resume includes faculty and leadership positions at three universities, two stints in government policy and this year, being named AE’s 2026 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient.
Her decision to study at the University of Illinois was easy. She grew up in the Chicago suburbs which meant in-state tuition and both of her older siblings had earned degrees from Illinois. Choosing to major in aerospace engineering was also a natural fit.
“I was good at math and science, which led me to engineering,” Sharp said. “I really liked planes and I knew aerospace was the hardest engineering major to get into at Illinois, so I decided to go for that. I did well in my undergraduate program, liked learning and being in a university setting, and then had the opportunity to go to grad school at Cambridge University, which was too good an opportunity to pass up! After one year in England, I still felt there was much more to learn before taking a job and continued graduate studies at the University of California-Berkeley, then back at Illinois in theoretical and applied mechanics.
“When I got to the end of my Ph.D. program, I looked at my options, and it seemed like the natural thing was to look for a faculty job.”
As an undergrad, Sharp met her future husband, David F. Hill, who was also a ’93 aerospace engineering grad and both went into academia. They’ve been able to make parallel career changes, almost always. Her two positions in Washington, D.C. were the exceptions.
“Dave and I both had jobs lined up at Penn State, and we wanted to be in the same place, but I was also interested in policy. I applied for an AAAS American Institute of Physics Congressional Science Fellowship and was offered the position. So, for one formative year, I worked in the office of Senator Joe Lieberman, then went to my job at Penn State.”
As a young mechanical engineering professor, Sharp said teaching, research and publishing were all consuming. But after 20 years in academia, policy still had a strong pull.
“I saw a posting that looked like a dream job.”
Sharp became head of the Office of International Science and Engineering in a four-year term at the National Science Foundation. She said she is especially proud of the diplomatic work she accomplished.
“We negotiated bilateral joint funding programs and partnerships with foreign governments. For these programs, an international team submits a joint proposal for a single review process. If selected, NSF funds the U.S. side and the other country funds their side. This mechanism was already in existence, but we doubled the number of bilateral joint funding programs over the course of my four years there, expanding to India, Switzerland, Taiwan and more.”
After being in a senior executive leadership position at NSF, Sharp wanted her next move to be where she could have real impact. For 15 years prior, she had been a mechanical engineering faculty member and in leadership positions at Oregon State University where she founded and directed OSU’s humanitarian engineering program. She could have returned.
“My early-career research was relatively fundamental. Over time, I wanted to be closer to the actual impact on societal good, making people’s lives better. After NSF, I saw an opportunity to go to Santa Clara University as dean of the School of Engineering. SCU’s mission statement to build ‘a more humane, just and sustainable world’ appealed to me.”
Sharp had been at SCU for about six months when she was asked to work with SCU’s president and other leadership to collaborate on shaping a concept for a large gift in the area of AI.
In April, Santa Clara announced that Debora Shoquist, SCU trustee, endowed the new Cunningham Shoquist Center for Applied AI and Human Potential, housed in the School of Engineering. Sharp is grateful to Shoquist for her vision and generosity and is excited to lead the launch of the new center.
The center will be tackling questions about AI, guided by the same principles of care and compassion for humanity and the world that first attracted Sharp to Santa Clara.
“We’re all still learning about AI. The edges are a little blurry and we don’t have the guardrails in place yet for transparency, fairness and how to reduce bias.
“Of course, there’s a real opening for engineers to apply AI to make people’s lives better, and to augment human potential. SCU, with its emphasis on educating the whole person and developing critical thinking skills, is a natural fit for a center with this emphasis.”
Sharp said she’d like to see the center be a leader in applied AI for societal good, a convening force for rapidly evolving technologies and a go-to place for academic industry collaboration in Silicon Valley.
“This is the fourth Center of Distinction on the Santa Clara campus. It’s housed in the School of Engineering, but the work of the center will be interdisciplinary, serving the whole university, and as far as I'm concerned, serving the whole community.”