Recognized for his outstanding contributions to engineering education and research, Said I. Abdel-Khalik currently holds the Southern Nuclear Company Distinguished Professorship at Georgia Tech. Prior to that, he was associate director of the School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and professor of nuclear engineering and engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin. He has supervised more than 70 graduate theses and authored over 250 publications, including 90 journal articles in the areas of reactor engineering and thermalhydraulics with emphasis on two-phase flow and boiling heat transfer.

Ph.D. (1973), University of Wisconsin.

Sumanta Acharya is an outstanding educator and researcher. During his career, he has acquired an international reputation for his expertise in the field of computational heat transfer and fluid mechanics. He is known particularly for applying the combined strategies of adaptive differencing and adaptive grid refinement for solving complex flow problems. Acharya has published over 150 refereed articles, of which almost half have been published in top archival journals and the rest have been presented at refereed conferences. His dedication to teaching is reflected in the many graduate students he has advised and the four new courses he has developed at LSU. Archarya has supported his profession by serving on several national-level committees and has organized many technical sessions at conferences.

Ph.D. (1982), University of Minnesota.

The main contribution of Suresh G. Advani in the last 15 years has been in the development and application of a fundamental science base in modeling and simulation of composite manufacturing processes. He edited a book on Flow and Rheology in Polymer Composite Manufacturing in 1994, which lays the foundation for modeling approaches when processing with composites. He has graduated 11 Ph.D.s and 14 master's students with sound expertise in modeling of manufacturing processes using fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and material rheology. Advani has co- authored 17 book chapters and more than 100 publications in journals and conference proceedings. In 1987, he put forth a new theory for how fibers flow in suspensions, and this theory has been implemented in commercial codes such as C-Flow and mold flow.

Ph.D. (1987), University of Illinois.

During his career, Arthur Akers, P.E., has been involved in education, research, and development and extension activities. He has published well over 100 papers in almost every international journal and conference in his areas of expertise, and has supervised over 50 master's and Ph.D. students. His research into axial piston pumps has been referenced by many researchers around the globe. Akers has not restricted his activities to purely academic endeavors. He was instrumental in the formation and development of the Fluid Power Systems and Technology Division of ASME. His vision and drive has led to the success and growth of this fledging group within ASME.

Ph.D. (1969), University of London.

The career of Yusuf Altintas spans 22 years. After receiving his bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering, he spent several years in industry as a machine tool and manufacturing engineer. He joined the University of British Columbia as a faculty member after receiving his Ph.D., and initiated fundamental and applied research in chatter vibrations in milling, design of text generation open architecture CNC systems, and sensor-based intelligent machining. He contributed a new milling chatter stability theory to the literature, and demonstrated its industrial application in five axis milling of jet engine compressors at Pratt & Whitney Canada, where he improved productivity significantly and received the manufacturing research award. Altintas initiated a new five-year combined bachelor's and master's degree in the electromechanical design engineering program at UBC.

Ph.D. (1987), McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

George Antaki, P.E., is a member of the ASME Boiler & Pressure Vessel Code Section III Working Group Piping Design and the ASME B31 Mechanical Design Committee, actively involved in the development of design criteria and qualification methods for pressure piping systems. As chairman of the Pressure Vessel Research Council Subcommittee on Dynamics Stress Criteria, he has sponsored projects in dynamic analysis and testing of piping and equipment, and has published papers and two Welding Research Council Bulletins on the subject. He recently chaired the ASME-IEEE Joint Task Group on Seismic Qualification, which developed the first set of comprehensive rules for use of earthquake experience in equipment qualification. His work in the area of seismic qualification earned him the Department of Energy's Certificate of Appreciation. He currently chairs the Savannah River Site Pressure Equipment Protection Committee with responsibility for implementation of the ASME Code for over 7,000 pressure vessels and relief devices.

M.S. (1985), University of Liege, Belgium.

Cristina Amon has made outstanding contributions in thermo-fluids fundamental research, practice, and education. She has elucidated the flow mechanisms that induce heat transfer enhancement in self-sustained oscillatory flows, has clarified the significance of conjugate time-dependent effects in electronic packages, and has developed a multistage concurrent thermal design methodology. Amon has applied her work to the development of microcasting shape deposition, artificial lungs, and transient thermal management techniques for wearable computers. After obtaining her Sc.D. in 1988, she joined Carnegie Mellon University and was promoted to professor in 1997. She was appointed director of the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems, in 1999. She has received numerous honors for teaching, research, and service, including Engineer of the Year from the ASME Pittsburgh Section in 1999.

Sc.D. (1988), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lawrence A. Bergman's career spans the last three decades. He worked first at TRW Inc. in Cleveland, where he helped design fuel systems for high-performance military and commercial aircraft. Immediately thereafter, at Lord Corp. in Erie, Pa., he designed and developed vibration isolation and motion accommodation systems for the aerospace and offshore drilling industries. Upon completing his graduate education, he began his teaching career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is professor of aeronautical and astronautical engineering. His current research interests include structural dynamics, structural control, stochastic processes, and system identification.

Ph.D. (1980), Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland.

Michael M. Bernitsas has 140 publications in offshore and marine mechanics. He developed a catastrophe theory for noniterative mooring design. He proved that internal pressure may cause Euler buckling of risers in tension. In 1983, he corrected the long column buckling theory holding since 1941. He developed the Large Admissible Perturbation theory for structural redesign and serves on ONR committees, NSF panels, and the U.S. Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Committee. Bernitsas is associate editor of OMAE Journal, ASME, and serves on three journal boards. He is also professor and chairman of naval architecture and marine engineering at the University of Michigan, and consults to offshore and marine industries.

Ph.D. (1979), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Heinz P. Bloch, P.E., began his career at Johnson & Johnson, where he contributed to the development of high-speed machinery. In 1965, he joined Exxon, where he became an internationally recognized expert in machinery reliability improvement and failure avoidance. He spearheaded the application of plant-wide oil mist lubrication systems and the development of mechanical seals for steam turbines. For six years he served as Exxon's regional machinery specialist for the U.S. before his early retirement in 1986. At his Process Machinery Consulting Co., he continues teaching, consulting, and writing: 10 full-length textbooks, 160 papers or articles in trade journals, and contributions to Perry's Handbook of Chemical Engineering and other texts.

M.S. (1964), New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark.

Since 1982, David G. Bogard has been a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin. He is noted for his studies of the physical nature of turbulent wall flows, and his investigations of film cooling of turbine airfoils. Using unique conditional sampling analyses of the structure of turbulence, his research revealed the dynamics of turbulence production and mechanisms of drag reduction. His studies of turbine airfoil film cooling involved comprehensive measurements of the velocity and thermal fields associated with film cooling flows, including the effects of hole geometry, coolant density, pressure gradient, surface roughness, and mainstream turbulence.

Ph.D. (1982), Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind.

Albin Bolcs' career spans the last 30 years. He worked in the Swiss turbomachinery industry before joining the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, where he has directed the turbomachinery and heat transfer laboratory since 1983 and serves as professor of turbomachinery. Bolcs has developed an internationally recognized laboratory that specializes in turbomachinery unsteady aerodynamics and aeroelasticity and, more recently, also in turbine blade heat transfer. He has authored or co-authored many scientific papers in these fields and has co-authored a textbook on transonic turbomachines. The unsteady aerodynamic cascade data obtained in Bolcs' laboratory are used by the international turbomachinery community as benchmark data for the evaluation of computational predictions.

Ph.D. (1974), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Dennis Bowman, P.E., made many significant contributions to industry and professional societies. He was mainly responsible for the introduction of state-of the-art concepts to hydraulic systems and control at Deere and Co. Indeed, he was the main innovator in bringing electronics and electric controls into the agricultural machinery business. He contributed unselfishly to ASME by being organizer, chair, presenter, and author at numerous ASME meetings. In addition, he was the second chair of the fledgling Fluid Power Systems and Technology Group and helped set the foundation on a course for growth. His untimely death was a loss to all who knew and worked with him.

M.S. (1966), University of Iowa.

As an educator, John Burns has been chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Dean of Engineering at the University of Waterloo, which has one of the largest engineering facilities in Canada. His research on the design and failure analysis of high-pressure vessels has been internationally recognized and used in the ASME Code. Burns' work on pipelines and other welded structures has been used in various Canadian standards. For much of his career, he has been involved in the evaluation of the long-term performance and safety of the fuel channels in the Candu Nuclear Reactors.

Ph.D. (1962), University of Bristol, U.K.

John C. Cerny, P.E. began his career as a machinist, mechanic, and welder in his family-owned manufacturing and machine company. The Atlanta ASME Section was top in the Region while he was chairman in 1986. As principal engineer and chairman of the board of Cerny and Ivey, his current fields of interest are product and machine design, fractography and materials failure analysis, corrosion science, physical testing, safety, vehicles and accident reconstruction, and forensic science. Cerny has provided expert testimony in court and served as advisor to state, county, and city officials in matters relating to codes and standards. He served in the U.S. Army as an anti-aircraft battery commander and as a battalion intelligence officer.

M.S. (1956), Georgia Institute of Technology.

After earning his Ph.D., Shih-Jung Chang devoted three decades to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is a senior staff member there and has been a member of ASME for 25 years. In the early 1980s, after he observed the in-situ electron microscope result on the dislocation structure at the crack tip, Chang developed the dislocation free zone model of fracture that led to the understanding of the effect of the dislocation emission at the crack tip of the physical significance of brittle versus ductile fracture. His theory generalized the BCS theory of fracture and was regarded as the augmented BCS model. Since 1990, he has been responsible for the structural design work of the Oak Ridge high flax isotope reactor (HFIR). Chang developed an analytical method of fracture probability calculation for the HFIR remaining life study that may be applied more efficiently to replace the Monte Carlo Simulation currently used by the NRC-sponsored Praise code and Favor code.

Ph.D. (1968), Stanford University.

Won S. Chang, deceased, was a prolific author of high-quality papers over a broad range of heat and mass transfer problems, particularly those concerned with heat pipes and thermocapillary stresses. He was able to exploit fundamental research to impact the design and performance of practical devices, such as heat pipes and capillary-pumped two-phase loops. He also had the talent to work well with others in government, industry, and universities. He skillfully managed several large research projects involving graduate and undergraduate students.

Ph.D. (1981), Georgia Institute of Technology.

Tsu-Wei Chou is the Jerzy L. Nowinski Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delaware. His research interests and contributions have been in the application of analytical techniques to the study of a broad range of material problems, including the application of the concept of physical defects to understanding the deformation behavior of metallic, biological and geological systems; analytical modeling of the microstructure-performance relationship of polymeric fiber composites; and processing science and damage mechanics studies of metal- and ceramic-based composites. Chou is the author of Microstructural Design of Fiber Composites and co-author of Composite Materials and Their Use in Structures.

Ph.D. (1969), Stanford University.

After completing his undergraduate and graduate degrees at MIT, Jonathan S. Colton, P.E., joined the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has risen through the faculty ranks, teaching and performing research in the areas of manufacturing and design. His work focuses on polymer and polymer composites materials development and processing, as well as on the design of equipment and systems. He has made significant contributions to the development of novel composites processing techniques and equipment, which have reduced their time and cost. He has been a visiting professor at Imperial College, London, and was a visiting faculty associate at Lockheed-Martin.

Ph.D. (1986), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Return to ME Homepage

Edward T. Curran's career spans almost half a century. Following a 20-year career as an RAF engineer officer, he emigrated to the United States and started working in 1969 at the USAF Propulsion Directorate at Wright Field. He later served as chief scientist (11 years) and as director (five years). He has led the development of innovative aeropropulsion and power technologies such as: The Integrated High Performance Turbine Engine Technology (IHPTET) program; the Hypersonic Technology (HyTech) engine program; and advanced fuel and lubricants program; and the More Electric Aircraft (MEA) power initiative. In 1997, Curran also became responsible for rocket engine technology, giving him total management of the $200 million total USAF Propulsion and Power area.

Ph.D. (1975), Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio.