By Philip Walzer

Heidi Ries (Ph.D. ’87) started young as a physicist. “There’s a picture of me as a toddler by the side of the lake; they said I was interested in how the waves were coming to the shore,” she said. She credits her father — an Ohio music teacher who incorporated science in his lessons — with instilling that precocious interest.

Since 2019, Ries has been provost and chief academic officer of the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) near Dayton, Ohio, overseeing an academic enterprise that reaches more than 20,000 students a year, employs 270 faculty and offers 13 doctoral and 25 master’s degree programs.

The best part, she said, is telling incoming faculty about the crucial role they will play in the nation’s defense and hearing their ideas. “The mix of military and civilian faculty brings a dynamic to AFIT that I don’t think you find at any other institution.”

As a doctoral student at Old Dominion University, Ries worked at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, studying how Ultem, a new polymer to be used in the International Space Station, would withstand decades of radioactivity. “It gave me a broader perspective of the scientific enterprise,” Ries said.

From ODU, she went to Norfolk State University, helping launch the Center for Materials Research, which would offer Norfolk State’s first master’s degrees in science. Ries was promoted to director in 1997.

Two years later, she joined AFIT as associate dean of research. There, too, Ries saw the value in building centers. “Teams of researchers have bigger impacts than individual researchers,” she said. The institute has since established nine. One focuses on directed energy, such as high-energy lasers. “The Department of Defense first deployed a laser defensive weapon in one of their ships in 2014. AFIT had been involved in some of the software production to make that happen.”

Ries became interim provost in 2019 and full provost in 2021. She oversees academic programs, develops academic policies and interacts with higher-ups in the military and Congress.

Ries, who earned both her bachelor’s and master’s in physics from The Ohio State University, mentioned that she first attended the school with her mother, an adult learner studying elementary education. “I tell people I was a very early starter in going to college science classes.”