Dec 01, 2004 - Claremont, Calif. -

Clive L. Dym, a professor at Harvey Mudd College (HMC), is being recognized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) for exceptional contributions to design education through widely cited authorship on engineering design, through sponsorship of workshops and conference panels, and through enthusiastic mentoring of engineering students in the art and science of design. He will receive the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award during the Design Engineering Technical Conferences, being held in Salt Lake City, Sept. 28 through Oct. 2.

The award, established in 1998, recognizes a person who exemplifies the best in furthering engineering design education through vision, interactions with students and industry, scholarship and impact on the next generation of engineers, and whose action serves as a role model for other educators to emulate.

Dym joined HMC in 1991 and is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Engineering Design and director of the Center for Design Education. His accomplishments at HMC include the 1992 launching of a pilot freshman design course that included the study of conceptual design methods and their application to real problems posed by non-profit clients, such as schools and hospitals. This course emerged as a fundamental building block of HMC's engineering program. In 1997, Dym initiated a series of biennial Mudd Design Workshops to address issues in engineering design education that have attracted design educators, researchers and practitioners in the field.

Prior to joining HMC, Dym was already internationally known as a scholar in applied mechanics and acoustics, and a pioneer in applying artificial intelligence to the modeling of engineering design tasks. He held appointments at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.); Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; the Institute for Defense Analyses (Alexandria, Va.); and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He also held visiting appointments at the TECHNION-Israel Institute of Technology (Haifa, Israel); the Institute for Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton, U.K.; Stanford University, California; Xerox PARC (Palo Alto, Calif.); Carnegie Mellon; and Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.).

A Fellow of ASME, Dym has published more than 100 archival journal articles, conference proceeding papers and technical reports, and has lectured widely. He has written ten books and has served on the editorial boards of several journals.

After receiving his bachelor's degree in civil engineering at Cooper Union (New York, NY) in 1962, Dym earned his master's in applied mechanics at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1964. In 1967, he earned his doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University (Calif.). Dym is a registered professional engineer in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.

Founded in 1880 as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, is a 120,000-member professional organization focused on technical, educational and research issues of the engineering and technology community.