Thank you for your interest in my situation at the University of Texas at Austin, the Aerospace Engineering Department. I was at that time a member of three protected groups:
- Older-than-average students (I was 40+ years old)
- Disabled veterans
- Special Disabled Vietnam Veteran
First, the Facts
Continuing and escalating harassment over 16 months, culminating in dismissal under false pretenses in December 2001. The reasons cited for the dismissal include:
- Failure to pass the PhD qualifying exams after one year in grad school, a rule that applies after you receive a Master’s. I started classes with a 20-year-old BS in a different discipline and, in fact, did not receive my MSE until after I was expelled.
- Unable to show PhD-quality research, as a requirement to take the oral qualifying exam (I passed the written exams) to thereafter be admitted into candidacy, whose sole purpose is to learn how to do PhD-quality research.
- Ultimately, no professor in the orbital mechanics specialty would be my adviser, arguably because of the abysmal quality of my Mars research project, which was deemed “unfit for even a senior undergraduate research topic.
The Contentious Research
I presented a computer model of the Mars trajectory in a formal department seminar in November 2000. The methodology featured two core breakthroughs:
- Using third-body topology to save 15% on final Mars approach.
- Using reverse integration to solve the trajectory without requiring a third-party nonlinear optimization algorithm.
Cesar Ocampo, my advisor at the time, set up this seminar. He quit as my advisor a week later because I insisted my solution was not in NASA’s solution set, based on decades of studying the Mars trajectory.
The Alleged Misappropriation
Less than three months later, Cesar Ocampo announced Copernicus, a breakthrough generalized trajectory design software built on the same methods. NASA announced massive funding for the program in August 2001. Dr. Ocampo built his career on this program.
I allege that Ocampo, David Hull, the graduate advisor (whose specialty was nonlinear optimization – I solved the Mars problem directly, without the standard nonlinear app), Wallace Fowler (my advisor after Ocampo), and the rest of the orbits group knew exactly what I had accomplished, and conspired to run me out of graduate school so Ocampo could use my work on Copernicus.
This malice included, among other things:
- Forcing the AIAA to remove my formal paper on their graduate students’ projects website
- Refusing to support my presentation of this same paper at the annual Mars Society conference, where the abstract had been accepted a year previously
- Aiding the Office of Student Legal Services in attempting to expel me for putting my research online
- Refusing to give me practice sessions for the oral PhD qualifying exam, as is standard practice
- Retaliating against me when I appealed to help to the Graduate College, then the Office of Students with Disabilities, and – absent any support – to ABET, the licensing authority for college degree programs
- Setting up an “ad hoc” committee to review my Mars research, then, when I did not meet with them because I was studying for my oral exam, summarily expelling me via letter in the U.S. mail.
All of these events are clearly stated in the appeals documents on University letterhead.
Why The Statute of Limitations is Still not Expired
Tolling for Disability / Mental Incompetence (Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.001)
Texas law explicitly pauses (tolls) the statute of limitations if a person is of “unsound mind” at the time the cause of action accrues. My medical history and progression to a 100% VA disability rating for schizophrenia provides strong documentary evidence that I lacked the cognitive capacity to discover, understand, or legally act upon the theft of his work for the past 25 years. The clock should only begin running from the date his incapacity subsided.
The Discovery Rule
The injury (the conversion and commercialization of the trajectory code) was inherently undiscoverable due to my institutional expulsion and severe medical condition. Under Texas law, the discovery rule delays the accrual of the cause of action until the plaintiff knew, or through the exercise of reasonable diligence should have known, of the injury.
Fraudulent Concealment
If UT Austin and the advisor actively disparaged the research as “unfit” to intentionally mislead me and obscure their intent to copy it, the statute of limitations is tolled due to affirmative fraud.
Note on Discovery
After years of malice at Texas, I was left with a math phobia. The best I could do was extract the 150+ diagrams from my dissertation and compose several books with psychology and philosophy analogies. Only in the last few months have I been able to even LOOK at orbital mechanics equations, without flashing back to an explosion of hate and malice.
That means the statute of limitations doesn’t start until right now, when I became aware of what happened.
A few weeks ago I discovered, while using an AI to investigate my case, that my Mars methods spawned an entirely new discipline in orbital theory a few years after I was expelled.
Then, in early October 2026, I discovered Cesar Ocampo’s Copernicus program. This was an exponential improvement over his previous research, elevating random efforts to optimize trajectories into a massive application of Three Body Theory, also using reverse integration specifically to further improve results.
Up until this time, I thought I was expelled because my research was just what they said it was – worthless. Suddenly, I realized my methods weren’t just good enough for a Ph.D. but that they spawned a whole new discipline in orbital mechanics – and that my own advisor, Cesar Ocampo, was paramount in that; well, the statute of limitations time clock begins now, October 2026.
Since we are still within the statute of limitations, prosecution for all the events stated is still possible, including a hate crime.