Dr. Smith has been chosen to receive the AHS Technical Fellow Award, and will be presented to Smith on May 6 during the 71st AHS Annual Forum & Technology Display.

The American Helicopter Society this week announced that Dr. Marilyn J. Smith has been chosen to receive the organization's Technical Fellow Award, an honor reserved for AHS members whose careers have improved the technical capabilities of the vertical flight industry. 

The award will be presented to Smith on May 6, during the 71st AHS Annual Forum & Technology Display, to be held in Virginia Beach, VA. Smith is one of just five AHS members world-wide to be selected for this award from government, academia, and industry.

In 2012 and again in 2014, AHS selected Smith for the Augusta Westland  International Fellowship award. She was nominated for the most recent honor by her colleagues from the School of Aerospace Engineering and the Vertical Lift Research Center or Excellence (VLRCOE).

That nomination lauded Smith for making "significant contributions to the advancement  of veritcal flight through her research in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), unsteady aerodynamics, and computational aeroelasticity."

It also recognized Smith's fierce mentorship of graduate and undergraduate students and her dedication to the work of the American Helicopter Society.

Dr. Marilyn J. Smith earned her undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees at Georgia Tech, where her studies were fully funded by Lockheed Martin. Dr. Smith’s doctoral research resulted in a Navier-Stokes solver coupled with the Hodges-Dowell nonlinear beam theory, which she used to study an aeroelastic rotor in hover. This effort in 1994 was a precursor to the CFD-CSD (computational structural dynamics) aeroelastic analysis performed routinely today, and it was one of the first successful (along with Ahmad and Bauchau) CFDCSD coupled simulations.

While working at McDonnell-Douglas Helicopter Company, Smith participated in the
NR2 program on noise reduction and worked on the design, computational analysis, and wind tunnel testing of research vehicles.  While at GTRI, she worked on the MH53J tail pylon structural flight test and modification program and produced some of the first Navier-Stokes CFD simulations of tilt-rotors in hover, modeling the well known fountain effect.