MMAE Seminar - Observations on Research, and on Leading a Department

Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical, Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Dr. Dietmar Rempfer, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Professor of Applied Mathematics at Illinois Institute of Technology, on Tuesday, January 12th to present his lecture, Observations on Research, and on Managing a Department.

Abstract

This talks presents some of the author's fundamental thoughts on the philosophy of engineering research at a university, and on the enterprise of leading and managing an academic department. It will turn out that there are indeed interesting parallels between these two realms, such that strategies that have proven productive in the research enterprise may also provide valuable guidance for academic leadership. A number of elements of a path forward and its implementation for the MMAE department will be outlined.

Biography

Dietmar Rempfer was awarded a PhD for his work on low-dimensional models and chaos in boundary-layer transition from the University of Stuttgart, Germany in 1991, and he finished his Habilitation in Fluid Mechanics at the same university in 1995. He has received the Hermann-Reissner Award for Aerospace Engineering in 1992, and a Heisenberg Grant in 1995. In 1996, Dr. Rempfer went to Cornell University as a Visiting Associate Professor where he worked with John Lumley on low-dimensional models for transitional and turbulent flows. He joined Illinois Institute of Technology in 2001 as an Associate Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering, where he was promoted to Professor in 2012. Since 2004 he also holds a joint appointment in IIT's Department of Applied Mathematics, first as an Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics, then as a Professor of Applied Mathematics in 2012. Dr. Rempfer has served as Associate Dean for IIT's Armour College of Engineering from 2012 to 2015, and as Interim Chair for the Department of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering since June of 2015. Dr. Rempfer's research continues to focus on topics in theoretical and applied fluid dynamics and turbulence, unsteady aerodynamics, and applications of dynamical systems theory and numerical methods to problems in fluid mechanics.