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DOUGLAS MUNCH, PHD, ’69 CHE: MODERN-DAY RENAISSANCE MAN
Villanova’s College of Engineering has a long list of impressive alumni whose accomplishments are deserving of a Who’s Who listing, Wikipedia page or New York Times article. Then there are alumni whose careers and life stories just may be worthy of a book. Douglas Munch, PhD, Chemical Engineering class of 1969, is one such alumnus. He graduated just months before the first moon landing and it’s fair to say his personal and professional contributions have also been out of this world.
Meeting Dr. Munch, one would be hard pressed to believe he’s 72 years old. A former track and field varsity athlete at Villanova, he still looks like he could complete a marathon, though he’s traded in his running shoes for swimming and cycling, which take less of a toll on his body. While at Villanova, Dr. Munch learned that he was the first Chemical Engineering major to win a varsity letter in 23 years, a source of pride which he admits, “didn’t make my grades any better.”
Acceptable but not stellar grades, however, didn’t hold him back. After graduating and considering offers from nuclear engineering research facilities (he had focused much of his studies in this area), Dr. Munch interviewed with Grumman Aerospace Corp., which held the contract for NASA’s lunar module. Joining the company soon before the Apollo 11 mission, he says, was a “no-brainer.” Working with the thermodynamics systems engineering team, he was responsible for the spacecraft’s environmental control system—the system keeping the crew alive.
Despite serving on the project for only a brief period before the historic flight, Dr. Munch’s name appeared on the parchment containing the signatures of the 1,500 employees who worked on the lunar module. That document accompanied the astronauts on their flight and was left behind on the moon’s surface, as were the parchments for subsequent missions. The exception, of course, was Apollo 13, whose lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank in the service module exploded two days into the mission.
When it comes to the subject of that fateful flight, Dr. Munch becomes emotional. He struggles to recount “the stress that we were under to get those guys back. The lunar module had become a lifeboat and having worked on the environmental control system, it was our job to keep them alive and help bring them home.” It’s an experience that clearly changed his life.
After contributing to four Apollo missions from Grumman’s Bethpage, NY, location, Dr. Munch moved with the company to Point Mugu Naval Air Station in California, where he ran the flight test and development program for the Navy’s F-14 fighter aircraft. He points out, “It is hard to imagine that two projects I worked on were made into movies. Apollo 13 was quite accurate as a documentary film with only a few scenes of Hollywood hyperbole; Top Gun was much more Hollywood.”
With several years in the aerospace industry under his belt, Dr. Munch decided to pursue a completely new career path. Having had his interest piqued by NASA’s Life Sciences Data Book with its charts and graphs of human performance under varying conditions, he set his sights on medical school. To prepare, he first earned a master’s in Mechanical Engineering and Biochemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He then enrolled in Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine, choosing medical school over graduate school because he “wanted to be able to speak medicine as well as the physicians who don’t speak engineering. That allows you to become a translator between them, and there were precious few people who could do that in those years.” Always an overachiever, Dr. Munch earned his PhD in Medicine and Biomedical Engineering in four years and 18 days, just missing the four-year deadline he’d given himself after being informed by the university that it would take six or seven years to graduate.
Medical school was followed by a post-doctoral research fellowship in cardiology, during which he invented an open-heart research procedure to measure the distribution of coronary blood flow in animals. He later entered the medical device industry, serving as a project engineer for Travenol Laboratories where his proudest achievement was a wearable drug delivery device for cancer patients. From there, professional highlights included working as director of health care new business development and life science research for Kimberly-Clark; joining a small biotech startup as president and CEO and working in cancer medicine; and serving as a vice president and board member for a division of Johnson & Johnson. In 1993, he started his own consulting practice, devoting 25 years to integrating medicine, technology and business for health care companies.
After retirement—a term that only loosely applies to him—Dr. Munch served as the editor of a sports medicine journal for which he wrote a series of articles on heart rate training; began exhibiting his photography and lecturing on its subjects (including Egyptian hieroglyphs); wrote a children’s book titled The Wild Life of Limericks with his wife Dr. Jean Merrill (who holds a PhD in Neuroimmunology); volunteered with a Johns Hopkins School of Public Health program dedicated to keeping Native American children in school; and started lecturing on topics as diverse as spirituality and genetics.
“I credit my accomplishments to a short attention span and high curiosity,” says Dr. Munch. “Those character traits—and life’s strange twists and turns—pushed me in a hundred different directions. I’ve been very lucky.”
DOUG MUNCH BY THE NUMBERS
3 degrees
4 Apollo missions
5 patents
10 board memberships
26 lectures and presentations
31 publications
MOST ENDURING ACCOMPLISHMENTS
• The Apollo program and the many accomplishments of the “enormously talented team that I was privileged to work with.” He says, “Those guys didn’t get to the moon on their own, they got to the moon because of many, many people who dedicated their careers to making that happen.”
• “Working on the F-14 in the capacity I did was an opportunity to serve our country, which I couldn’t have done in the military due to my sports injuries.”
• Getting into (after the admissions deadline had passed) and graduating from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine (nearly two years early), and later serving as chair of the board of the University’s Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Institute, are enormous sources of pride.
Dr. Douglas Munch displays a copy of the parchment with his signature that accompanied the Apollo 11 mission to space.
