VOLUME 13, NO. 2     NOVEMBER 2000

New directors for MFE, aerospace engineering

Two professors have assumed new posts within the Mechanical Engineering Department.

Christopher A. Brown, P.E., associate professor of mechanical engineering, has been appointed director of WPI's Manufacturing Engineering (MFE) Program. He succeeds Shaukat Mirza, who will now concentrate on research and teaching.

WPI currently offers a B.S., M.S., M.E. and Ph.D. in MFE, which is one of eight concentrations within the Mechanical Engineering Department. "Manufacturing engineering is arguably the original engineering discipline at this university," says Brown. "For well over a century it has supported the technological base of one of the most important manufacturing regions in the world. In Worcester County, 33 percent of all personal income comes directly from manufacturing payrolls."

A native of Vermont, Brown came to WPI in 1989 from Atlas Copco in Europe, where he was a senior research engineer working on the design and manufacture of air tools and air compressors. He is a founder of WPI's Surface Metrology Laboratory, whose researchers have made a number of discoveries about how to relate surface roughness to texture-sensitive properties. He represents the United States and WPI as a corresponding member of CIRP (the International Engineering Institution for Production Research), and is a member and past chair of the American Society of Manufacturing Engineers' Machining Technology Association Board of Advisors.

Nikos A. Gatsonis, associate professor of mechanical engineering, is the new director of WPI's Aerospace Engineering Program. More than 100 undergraduates are currently pursuing the aerospace concentration -- the largest component of the Mechanical Engineering Department. An additional 25 students are pursuing graduate degrees in mechanical engineering with thesis work related to aerospace engineering. Research revolves around experimental aerodynamics, fluid/structure interactions and control, space propulsion, microgravity fluid, and combustion sciences.

Funding sources for the program include NASA, the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and the Army Research Laboratory. "Graduate and undergraduate students often work together to advance complex, state-of-the-art aerospace science and technology projects," says Gatsonis. "New space flight experiments are currently being designed and built to fly on the International Space Station and shuttle."

A faculty member since 1994, Gatsonis received the Morgan Distinguished Instructorship in 1995 and the 1998-99 Norton/St. Gobain Award for his leadership in integrated graduate/undergraduate research. He holds degrees from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki in Greece, the University of Michigan, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Space Department at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory.