Chairman's Corner

Colleagues and Friends of the Department,
It is an honor and a privilege to serve as the new Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics Department Head. My predecessors have built an excellent department that truly values both teaching and scholarship.
In taking stock of our Department, I am excited to work with an outstanding faculty, staff, and student body. The University of Minnesota is involved in a strategic planning process which aims to place the University among the top three public research universities in the world. Being recognized as one of the top-ranked Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics department in the world is part of this vision. My goals over the next five years are to:
• Continue to hire and support the best and brightest faculty members who have a passion for research, teaching, service and a strong desire for the department to be outstanding.
•Improve the undergraduate and graduate educational experience.
• Establish closer ties to our alumni.
• Increase the visibility of the department within the Institute of Technology, University, locally, nationally, and internationally.
•Significantly increase the amount of fellowships and scholarships offered to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as increase endowments for professorships.
I look forward to working with you to build on the success of my predecessor, Professor Bill Garrard, toward being a top aerospace engineering and mechanics department nationwide and abroad. I want to take this opportunity to thank and acknowledge Bill for the many contributions and dedicated years of service in this role.
In coming months and years, the AEM department will focus on actively engaging alumni, a goal set by the AEM advisory board. You can help us accomplish this goal by helping us update our Alumni Network database, available at http://www.aem.umn.edu/alumni/alumni_network.shtml. Please take a few moments and visit the site. As an alumnus, if you have any suggestions on how we can keep you better informed about the events in the department, please let us know at dept@aem.umn.edu.
Students continue to do exciting things in the field of aerospace engineering and mechanics. Students of the Solar Vehicle Project (www.svp.umn.edu) finished fourth in the World Solar Rally. In spring of 2007, the Minnesat project will see its fruition – final selection of winning designs will occur. Twenty students from various IT departments make up the Minnesat program, and have been working on the project since fall 2005. Students once again participated in the Reduced Gravity experiment, where students conduct tests aboard NASA’s “Weightless Wonder” and experience about 30 seconds of freefall. Due to NASA changing its training aircraft for astronauts, students selected for the Fluid Mechanics experiment in 2004-2005 were delayed one year and participated alongside the 2005-2006 team. Photographs and a participant’s take on the experience are on Page 10.
We were pleased to award three exceptional alumni - John Michael Jordan, Richard DeLeo, and Thomas Lundgren - with “Outstanding Achievement” awards.
AEM saw longtime professor and friend Gordon Beavers retire at the end of the 2005-2006 academic year. While we were sad to see Professor Beavers go, AEM was pleased to welcome two new faculty members, Assistant Professor Bernard Mettler and Professor Ellad Tadmor. Professor Mettler’s research interests lie mainly in aerospace systems. Professor Tadmor is internationally known for his quasi-continuum method in solid mechanics. He has strong research connections with faculty members in our department, that of Mathematics, the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, Chemical Engineering, and Materials Science and Civil Engineering.
Several of our faculty were honored or distinguished with awards this past year. To highlight a few, Professor Demoz Gebre-Egziabher received a University McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, Professor William Garrard received the ASME/AIAA John Leland Atwood Award, Professor Fosdick was awarded a Laurea Specialistica Honoris Causa in Ingegneria Meccanica fro the Politechnico di Bari, Italy, Professor Lundgren was awarded the APS Fluid Dynamics Prize, Professor Ashley James received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and Professor Richard James received an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award from the German Government. You can read more about these in the Faculty News section on page 23.
Research in the department is thriving. The National Hypersonics Research Center, which was initiated in 2004 with funding from the Air Force, continues to expand and attract new sources of support. Center researchers are working on projects related to the Air Force Fundamental Research in Hypersonics flight test program, the DARPA/Air Force FALCON program, the Boeing/Air Force X-51A Scramjet Engine Demonstrator, the NASA/JPL Mars Science Laboratory, and the NASA Crew Exploration Vehicle - Orion. Computational methods developed at the Center are playing a central role in the Air Force Stability and Transition Analysis for Re-entry (STAR) program.
The BAEM program has seen some changes during the year. In part due to an increased interest in our program (just more than 7 percent of incoming high school students into IT expressed interest in the BAEM), we have elected to raise minimum requirements for upper division BAEM classes from a 2.0 GPA to 2.3 GPA
The AEM graduate program saw 15 students graduate and several students earn awards and fellowships; details are in this issue.
We have begun a new initiative to redesign the AEM main office and create two lounge areas for undergraduate and graduate students. The main office redesign will allow the staff to better serve our students and visitors while creating additional office space. The new office space comes at the expense of reducing by half the size of the department head office. The student lounges will serve both as a relaxation area and a working space. In addition to spending their free time in the lounge, students can hold study groups, discussions, and meetings in the lounge. These spaces would include several computer stations to help facilitate the preparation of materials for these study groups. Our goal is to create an overall environment within Akerman Hall that will be conducive to student-initiated academic study beyond the scope of coursework. We hope to have funding in place to realize this vision and initiate these renovations by early 2007.
I am excited to be part of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics’ future. I look forward to working with you to achieve our dreams and aspirations.
Best Regards,

Gary J. Balas
Department Head
balas(@aem.umn.edu)