Julia Drees

Julia Drees serves as a key procurement lead within the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Propulsion Directorate, supporting critical research and development initiatives under FA8650. She manages complex acquisition strategies for advanced aerospace propulsion systems, hypersonic technologies, and high-performance functional materials essential to maintaining U.S. air and space superiority. Her portfolio centers on fundamental and applied R&D contracts, ensuring timely delivery of innovative solutions through competitive, performance-based solicitations. Drees plays a pivotal role in aligning contracting actions with the agency’s mission to accelerate next-generation propulsion capabilities, from combustion dynamics to adaptive flight control architectures. She maintains long-standing partnerships with industry leaders including UES INC, General Electric Company, DCS Corporation, Spirit Aerosystems Inc, and Advanced Thermoplastic Composites LLC, leveraging their technical expertise in propulsion system design, materials science, and systems integration. These relationships are characterized by sustained collaboration on multi-year R&D efforts, often involving cost-reimbursement and firm-fixed-price contracts with technical performance metrics. Drees prioritizes deep technical alignment between contractor capabilities and mission-critical requirements, fostering innovation through early contractor engagement and prototyping-focused acquisition pathways. Drees’s contracting activity is exclusively conducted under open, unrestricted competition, with no set-asides for 8(a), HUBZone, SDVOSB, or other socioeconomic programs. This reflects the highly specialized nature of the technical work, which demands advanced engineering capabilities typically found only among large, established defense contractors with classified facility clearances and specialized R&D infrastructure. While small business participation is not formally structured into her acquisition strategy, she ensures fair competition through broad market research and open solicitations. Her procurement focus is entirely concentrated in NAICS 541715—Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences. She procures advanced propulsion components, hypersonic test hardware, thermally stable composites, and flight-ready materials systems, supporting projects that span combustion modeling, additive manufacturing of turbine components, and high-temperature structural alloys. Her domain expertise lies at the intersection of aerospace engineering, materials science, and systems integration for next-generation air and space platforms.