College Faculty Win a Prestigious NASA Award

NASA has just announced that a group of faculty from the Clark School of Engineering will be the recipient of a major award from NASA for the establishment of one of the seven NASA University Research, Engineering and Technology Institutes (URETI). The URETIs are a major step taken by NASA toward forging a stronger and expanded relationship with academia. These institutes are being established in areas of long-term strategic interest to NASA and the nation. Each URETI will have an initial life of five years and a maximum possible duration of 10 years. The budget for each URETI is approximately $3M per year.

The University of Maryland URETI which is in the area of 3rd Generation Reusable Launch Vehicles, is led by Professor Mark Lewis from the Department of Aerospace Engineering. Other participating faculty are: Profs. Wereley, Pines, Yu, Cadou, Akin from Aerospace Engineering, Ashwani Gupta and Steven Buckley from Mechanical Engineering, Smidts from Materials and Nuclear Engineering and Marshall from Fire Protection Engineering. The University of Maryland is the lead institution on this URETI; other participating academic institutions are: University of Michigan, University of Washington, North Carolina A&T and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. The other six winning proposals are from UCLA, Georgia Tech, Princeton, Texas A&M, University of Florida, and Purdue.

The Department offers its hearty congratulations to all.

Published June 13, 2002