UB Professor Kemper Lewis is Named ASME Fellow

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Kemper Lewis, PhD, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University at Buffalo's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and executive director of UB's New York State Center for Engineering Design and Industrial Innovation (NYSCEDII), has been named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Fellowship, which is the highest elected grade of membership in ASME, is conferred upon members with at least 10 years of active engineering practice who have made significant contributions to the profession.

ASME awarded the fellowship to Lewis in recognition of his significant contributions in mechanical engineering and engineering design through his research in decision modeling in design, distributed design, product archaeology, multi-objective optimization and cyberinfrastructure initiatives in design.

Lewis has led multi-university initiatives in decision-based design, including a series of workshops on the subject over more than a decade and textbooks that have impacted researchers, educators and practitioners around the world.

As executive director of NYSCEDII, he continues to integrate academic research, industrial implementation and educational innovations to create an engineering design program of sustained distinction. NYSCEDII was established in 2001 through the support of New York State Assembly sponsors Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Assemblyman Robin Schimminger, Assemblyman Paul Tokasz and other Western New York legislators. It is New York State's only engineering design research center in the state that utilizes virtual reality (VR) and scientific visualization and is among the nation's top few centers of engineering design and industrial innovation.

Currently, he is leading a team of faculty and researchers from eight departments across three academic units as part of UB's research site in the National Center for e-Design, a university and industry research consortium with Virginia Tech, Carnegie-Mellon, University of Central Florida, University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Brigham Young University. This center is funded by the National Science Foundation's Industry/University Cooperative Research Center program and is UB's only active center in the program.

Lewis' research interests include studying the stability and convergence of decentralized design systems, and formalizing tradeoff mechanisms in complex systems design.

His educational interests are focused on developing a modern design curriculum based on emerging concepts such as product archaeology, advanced design theory and product family design. He focuses on the educational foundations to prepare students to define and solve global design problems that demand engineered solutions considering technical, environmental, economic and cultural perspectives.

Lewis' research contributions have been archived in more than 120 referred conference and journal publications, and supported by research grants of more than $9.2 million. He was awarded an NSF CAREER Award in the Engineering Design and Innovation Program, the ASEE Fred Merryfield Design Award, the SAE Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award, the State University Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Milton Plesur Excellence in Teaching Award.

In addition, in 2007, he was chosen as the design representative on the National Academies Panel on Benchmarking the Research Competitiveness of the United States in Mechanical Engineering.

Lewis teaches and conducts research in the areas of mechanical design, system optimization and decision modeling. He has worked with companies and federal agencies on a wide range of engineering design problems including turbine engine product and process design; optimization of industrial gas systems; air and ground vehicle design; innovation in consumer product design; and manufacturing process control for thin film resistors, heat exchangers and medical electronics.

He received his BS in mechanical engineering and BA in mathematics from Duke University and his MS, and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

He lives in East Amherst.