Pentagon honors 3 NAWCWD winners with Navy's top science and engineering awards

Three Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division employees won 2026 Dr. Delores M. Etter Top Scientists and Engineers of the Year Awards for work that delivered for the fleet in 2025. The Navy honored the winners at a formal ceremony in the Pentagon Auditorium July 29.

Flight test engineer Joshua Williams and mechanical engineer Alejandro Valle won in the Emergent Engineer category, which recognizes professionals with less than 10 years of experience. Mason Paulec, a NAWCWD Fellow and infrared chief technologist, won in the Individual Scientist category.

The Navy presents the Etter Awards annually to its top military and civilian scientists and engineers whose work carries the most weight for national security. The awards are named for Delores M. Etter, who served as deputy undersecretary of defense for science and technology.

Joshua Williams

Flight test engineerEmergent Engineer category

Fixing the fleet’s eyes cost $1 million and a flight to Florida.

Above a carrier strike group, the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye sweeps hundreds of miles of sky with radar inside its 24-foot dome.

Remove that dome, and the radar can come back cross-eyed. At arm’s length, the error is a hair. At 200 miles, it’s miles.

Only Northrop Grumman’s St. Augustine facility could straighten it out. Each dome swap meant flying a West Coast Hawkeye coast to coast and parking it for weeks.

NAWCWD flight test engineer Joshua Williams changed that.

“Winning an award like this is fuel that gives me motivation to keep trying my best to support the warfighter,” Williams said.

Less than two years into his NAWCWD career, Williams went looking off California for one fixed point the radar could trust.

He wrote a test plan that began with a 10-foot radar reflector. Point Mugu’s land clutter swallowed it. He moved the reflector to San Nicolas Island, but the readings remained inconsistent.

North of the island, Begg Rock looked promising. Then fishing boats crowded the water around it and fouled the data.

“At some point, I had to call it,” Williams said.

Williams revived an idea rejected before he arrived: AUTOMATIC IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM data. AIS is a vessel’s radio voice. Through it, ships broadcast their position, course and speed to help avoid collisions.

But vessels move. A 300-foot hull is a football field long, and the antenna may sit anywhere along it.

“I wanted to give AIS its best chance before scrapping it again,” Williams said.

He spent a day coding a prototype that rejected bad reports and averaged the remaining errors. Vessels went from clutter to calibration targets.

Williams ran data from St. Augustine through the prototype. The result nearly matched the manufacturer’s calibration. He documented the comparison, secured approval and turned the code into an application.

In September 2025, a Hawkeye with a replacement dome landed at Point Mugu carrying calibration data. Alone in his lab, Williams calculated the correction. Fleet Readiness Center Southwest, a Navy repair depot, loaded it.

A second flight confirmed that the correction worked: The radar was back within the Navy’s limit with room to spare.

“The numbers seemed too good, so I had to verify everything as well,” Williams said.

The Navy now owns the post-maintenance calibration process on both coasts. Each calibration saves more than 26 flight hours and $1 million.

Williams designed the tool to follow the fleet worldwide, though deployment has yet to begin. The manufacturer now calibrates E-2Ds only as they come off the production line.

“After that, it’s on us,” Williams said.

Mason Paulec

NAWCWD Fellow and infrared chief technologistIndividual Scientist category

Heat gives an aircraft away.

An aircraft’s engines and hot surfaces create an infrared signature that heat-seeking missiles can track. Aircrews answer with countermeasures, systems built to break a missile’s lock. Someone has to prove those countermeasures work before a crew bets on them.

Paulec, the infrared chief technologist for the Multi-Spectral Electronic Warfare Systems Division, built a faster way to run that proof.

His 2025 induction as a NAWCWD Fellow recognized his work in infrared signature measurements, analysis and countermeasures testing. Paulec came to NAWCWD in 2008 after six years working on ship self-defense systems at Naval Sea Systems Command.

Engineers have long relied on physical flight tests to evaluate how well an aircraft can defeat an infrared threat. These tests can take six months to plan and conduct. Flight time alone costs more than $50,000 an hour, and a single aircraft test can cost $500,000.

That buys data under one or two conditions. Aircrews fly at every altitude and airspeed, under every atmospheric condition, day and night. Computer models cover the ground between the conditions a test measures and those in which a crew actually flies. Calculating an exhaust plume from first principles requires processing time engineers do not always have.

“Let’s start with the measured image that we know is the answer and then come up with a model that reproduces that image in a way that doesn’t require all of those computations to do it,” Paulec said.

The result is a fast-rendering plume model that uses measured data to generate infrared scenes for analysis. The plume is hot engine exhaust. The eye misses it. In the infrared, it reads like a fireball.

Paulec cut the math along each line of sight from thousands of computations to tens. He put the trade-off in numbers.

“We’re sacrificing a couple percent accuracy, but then we’re getting a hundredfold on how quickly it renders,” Paulec said.

The model now renders scenes thousands of times per second. That speed lets it run in Navy hardware-in-the-loop laboratories in Crane, Indiana, and in Air Force laboratories at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Physical missile components there react to a digital scene instead of a live target.

Without buying a flight test, engineers can test a new flare pattern or see how a previously measured countermeasure performs under an A-10 rather than an F-16. Paulec estimates the speed lets teams run five to 10 times more scenarios than before.

Paulec credits the group with that work. The reason for it sits in the cockpit.

“That’s what keeps our aviators alive,” Paulec said. “They need to know: Where can I be detected? Where can I be shot at? How effective is this missile against me? What can I do about it when it is launched?”

Most of the work looks nothing like that.

“You might be working on a spreadsheet or you might be looking at data ... or doing calibrations on a sensor,” Paulec said. “But ultimately, how does that then translate to lives saved is really what we’re after.”

The award names one person.

“One person doesn’t get anything done, especially with flight tests, especially all the instrumentation, all the tasks we perform,” Paulec said. “That’s not a one-person job.”

The lab does not get the last word. Whatever countermeasure solution comes out of it goes back to a flight test against a real missile, and the answer comes back to the model.

Alejandro Valle

Mechanical engineerEmergent Engineer category

A scratch in the paint could condemn a Navy rocket motor.

Not a crack in the casing. A surface scratch, judged against rejection criteria so strict and so vague that no one could say exactly where they came from.

The motors came from the Evolved SeaSparrow Missile program, where Valle supported in-service engineering for an international consortium. He watched good propulsion sections fail inspection and head for decommissioning. By his count, more than $4 million worth of working motors sat unused in magazines.

“The project addresses a reliability issue that has been ongoing for years,” Valle said. “The propulsion sections of our missiles were being rejected due to very strict and vague criteria for scratches and gouges.”

Valle came to NAWCWD in 2018. A car enthusiast, he learned about machines by tinkering with them. His desk still reflects that interest: Hot Wheels, Lego cars and 3D-printed figures. The mechanical engineer in the Weapons Processing Hardware Branch wanted to know where the scratch rules originated.

The rules came from conservative computer simulations. No one had fired a damaged motor to validate the results.

Valle spent four years building the empirical case. Then he proposed a test that drew widespread skepticism: Carve a 40-inch gouge down the body of an active rocket motor, creating damage far beyond anything the rulebook had rejected, and fire it.

The motor fired flawlessly.

“The successful firing proved that the criteria we had been using for years were likely flawed and overly conservative,” Valle said. “This opened the door to proving we can bring millions of dollars of assets back into the fleet.”

Every motor saved avoids the cost and lead time of building a new one as global conflicts drain munitions inventories.

Valle is planning more firings under varying conditions to establish a statistically sound safety margin. He is also building an automated optical scanner that maps a motor’s damage and assigns a pass-or-fail grade, taking human subjectivity out of the decision.

The award caught him off guard.

“Admittedly, I was surprised to receive the announcement,” Valle said. “I had felt my research had not yet yielded the kind of results that were noticed. This award is incredibly motivating and confirms that our work is making a real difference.”

NAWCWD congratulates Williams, Paulec and Valle, three of the command’s own whom the Navy recognized for work that reaches the fleet.

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