Dr. Michael Hesse
Vice Provost for Research and Innovation

Dr. Michael Hesse serves as Vice Provost for Research and Innovation (VPRI) at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), where he provides strategic leadership for the university’s research enterprise. In this role, he oversees the development and execution of research priorities that advance the Navy, Marine Corps, and Department of Defense. He directs efforts to expand interdisciplinary collaboration, foster partnerships with government, industry, and academia, and support faculty and student innovation. Dr. Hesse also plays a central role in advancing the Naval Innovation Center at NPS, aligning cutting-edge research with operational challenges to accelerate solutions for national security.

Prior to coming to NPS, Dr. Hesse was the Director of the Science Directorate at NASA’s Ames Research Center, a position in the Senior Executive Service. In this role, he was leading a staff of about 500 government and contract employees, and postdoctoral fellows engaged in Earth science, planetary and astrophysical research, and space biological research. His responsibilities included provision of an entrepreneurial vision, scientific leadership, the management of organizational resources, management and development of budget and financial resources, internal and external partnerships, and overall implementation of NASA priorities. He represented the organization to senior leadership of government and nongovernmental organizations inside the U.S. and internationally.

Before joining Ames, Dr. Hesse spent three years at the University of Bergen in Norway, where he held a professorship in physics. In Bergen, he also led the Geomagnetic Expert Service Centre, a multi-national consortium providing space weather services to ESA. He further held a part-time position with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, where he contributed to research and leadership of NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission.

Prior to moving to Bergen, Dr. Hesse had a distinguished 25-year career at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), culminating in his role as the Director of the Heliophysics Science Division, a Senior Executive Service position. Dr. Hesse was also the founding Director of the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC), the world’s foremost organization providing unprecedented comprehensive modeling services to the international space science community.

Dr. Hesse had various roles in NASA missions, most recently that of Lead Co-Investigator for Theory and Modeling for NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission. He remains a publishing research scientist in space science and space weather, with more than 300 papers in the scientific literature, and an H index of 75. He was elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2010, he received NASA’s Outstanding Leadership Medal in 2007, and NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2017. Dr. Hesse was elected member of Academia Europea in 2019, and he received the Space Weather and Nonlinear Waves and Processes prize of the American Geophysical Union in the same year. In 2023 he was recognized by the Meritorious Presidential Rank Award for Senior Executives. Dr. Hesse received his diploma and doctoral degree in Theoretical Physics from the Ruhr-Universität in Bochum, Germany. Dr. Hesse’s hobbies are hiking, travel, sports cars, and amateur photography.