Board, Staff and Consultants

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Eward teaches at American Public University and has consulted for museums across the United States, including the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago; Boston Museum of Science; and Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. His lifelong interest in aviation was inspired by his family's deep roots in aviation history: from the skies over World War I France to the present day, many of his relatives have served with distinction as military aviators. Two have given their lives in the line of duty and are commemorated in the names of US Air Force bases.
 

Formally trained in neuroscience (MA, Columbia) and in history, Eward has enjoyed parallel careers as a scientist, writer, illustrator and above all, as an educator. His work has appeared in National Geographic, Life Magazine, Newsweek, Scientific American, Time Magazine and other publications. Eward's most recent book, Ia Drang 1965: The Struggle for Vietnam's Pleiku Province (Osprey Publishing, 2020), written with historian Paul Harris, covers an early chapter in the history of helicopters at war.

Les’ currently works as the Chief of Public Affairs & Outreach for  the National Cemetery Administration (NCA), Dept. of Veterans  Affairs. Before joining the NCA, he served at the Pentagon as the  Director of Public Affairs for the National Guard Bureau.  In that capacity, he was the senior-most public affairs officer in the  National Guard and served as an advisor to the Chief of the National  Guard Bureau, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Melnyk served in a  variety of operational, history and public affairs billets in the Army National Guard over the course of a 30-year career.  He deployed to Iraq in 2011-2012 as the Command Historian for US.  Forces-Iraq, and retired as a colonel in June 2018.
 

A native of Queens, New York, Mr. Melnyk holds both a Masters and a  Ph.D. in History from the City University of New York, and a Masters in  Government Information Leadership from National Defense University. He  has been fascinated with helicopters from a young age, and while his poor eyesight prevented him from becoming a pilot in  the Army, he is a proud graduate of the Army's Air Assault School. 

Marusak served for many years as chair of the Chemistry Department and secretary of the faculty at Kenyon College prior to her current position as a risk analyst in the Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota. Both a chemist and a veterinarian, Marusak has published extensively in academic journals and as a textbook author. Her interest in helicopter history was piqued by her father's experiences in the US Army in World War II. As an airborne trooper, he took part in the relief of Bastogne and in a number of glider missions that prefigured the helicopter operations of later conflicts.  

Harris is a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst—the British West Point—where he has taught in the Department of War Studies for more than thirty years. He has published extensively in the field of 20th century military history, having written on the early history of armored warfare, the First World War and the War in Vietnam. Harris' work is widely acclaimed and a 2008 book garnered him the prestigious Templer Prize and Medal, presented by the Duke of Kent. His book Vietnam's High Ground: Armed Struggle for the Central Highlands 1954-1965 (University Press of Kansas, 2016), discusses the advent of large scale use of the helicopter in combat, which established a pattern that would shape the outcome of that war and influence military helicopter operations to the present day.