James Bickford

Jim Bickford is currently a senior member of the technical staff at The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. As a Draper staff member he has led nearly a dozen internal and external programs that range from very early stage development to fielding hardware systems. In particular, he conceived of and led a program funded by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) that looked at the natural production and mining of antiparticles for space missions. The program investigated the generation of antiproton radiation belts in planetary magnetospheres and developed advanced concepts for anti-proton storage and propulsion built around the concept of extracting antiparticles from the belts. He also supervised a MIT MS student thesis on the topic. Jim Bickford has also been active in a number of other areas. He was the technology development lead for the Draper/MIT Crew Exploration Vehicle study and the chair of the NASA Concept Exploration & Refinement technology infusion panel. He was also the Draper lead on a sensor for studying the chemistry of planetary surfaces and a program focused on networks of buoyant weather probes. Recently he has also been active in the energy sector and has developed a sensor to improve the efficiency of fossil fuel plants. Related to this, he was the program manager of a program focused on producing low cost health monitoring systems for equipment in power plants and was the Draper technical lead for an effort studying the use of clathrates for gas compression and carbon capture. He received a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Tufts University in 1997 and a M.S. in mechanical engineering from Tufts in 1999.