Nancy Johnson

Lab Group Manager and Technical Fellow · General Motors Research and Development · company speakers →

Nancy Johnson is currently a Lab Group Manager and Technical Fellow at General Motors Research and Development in Warren, Michigan. When she joined the GM Research her research focus was on composite material structures and energy management. She established design and analysis methods for an all carbon composite body structure and led projects of the Automotive Composites Consortium. She is a founding member and Fellow of the American Society for Composites and was invited to give keynote addresses on the use of composites in the automotive industry. In the late 1990s, she became interested in how smart materials and adaptive structures could be utilized in the automotive industry. She recognized their potential and formed a new team at GM by hiring additional researchers in India and Michigan to bring smart materials into product and manufacturing processes. She established GM’s strategy for smart materials and led the research necessary to enable the transition into real products while working to develop the necessary supply base. She conducted fundamental research necessary to advance smart materials in the automotive industry with a focus on shape memory alloys and shape memory polymers. Nancy has over 275 patents, many of which are in the area of smart materials and adaptive structures with many more in progress. Many of her patents are enablers for or specific applications utilizing smart materials in the automotive industry. Example applications are in the areas of vehicle aerodynamics, vehicle crashworthiness, occupant safety, and interiors. Her team developed design tools and established test procedures for smart materials-based devices and was responsible for getting shape memory based applications into production including the active hatch vent in Corvette. Nancy has over 80 publications on smart materials and their uses and applications. Nancy continues to lead multifunctional systems research work spanning multiple groups at General Motors and at HRL Laboratories, suppliers, and universities including the University of Michigan. She is co-director of the General Motors/University of Michigan Collaborative Research Laboratory, which has broadened its focus from smart materials and design tool development to multifunctional active systems. For over 20 years, Nancy has actively participated in ASME’s Adaptive Structures and Materials Systems community. She is a Fellow of ASME and has served as chair of the Aerospace Division, was General Chair of the 2013 SMASIS conference, and currently serves on the conference executive committee.

Is this you? Claim this profile →