Tim Lieuwen

This week was a time to celebrate the faculty of the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering. In two separate events, three of our treasured faculty were recognized for recent achievements.

On Sunday, September 30, Regents Professor Timothy Charles Lieuwen officially added "National Academy of Engineering" member to his long list of honors. The longtime AE professor and director of Georgia Tech's Strategic Energy Institute traveled to Washington, D.C. where he was formally inducted into the renowned engineering association during its Annual Meeting. Four days later, on Oct. 4, Lieuwen and his fellow Georgia Tech NAE inductees were feted during a campus ceremony. At that event, Lieuwen's longtime colleague, former AE chair (and fellow NAE member) Vigor Yang sang his praises before an audience that included dozens of his Georgia Tech peers.

On October 2, AE professors Dewey Hodges and Marilyn Smith were among the honored guests when Georgia Tech president Gordon "Bud" Peterson and Georgia Tech provost Rafael L. Bras hosted the first-ever Prestigious Faculty Awards Dinner, an event that recognized educators across the Institute for their receipt of prestigious external awards this past year. The evening affair was held at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center.

Dewey Hodges

Hodges was celebrated for receiving the American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics SDM Awards (Structures, Structural Dynamics & Materials). Established in 1967, the SDM is presented to an individual who has been responsible for an outstanding sustained technical or scientific contribution in aerospace structures, structural dynamics, or materials. When he received the award, this past January, he was quick to deflect attention from his towering resume of work.

“I consider myself blessed to have been taught and mentored by people who came before me, truly great minds in this field – people like Earl Dowell, Thomas Kane, Victor Berdichevsky,” he said.

“Really, it is my job to keep propagating, keep expanding the impact of this research through the collaborations I’ve had with my own mentors and with my graduate students. Without robust collaborations, good grief, we’d never get anything solved….”

Marilyn Smith

Smith, who serves as the Institute's associate director of the Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence, was recognized for receiving the NASA Group Achievement Award​ for her team's rotorcraft contributions towards the development of FUN3D, a suite of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools that is actively maintained by NASA to benefit the fields of aeronautics, space technology and exploration in research involving modeling fluid flow. Smith, along with three of her PhD graduates, Jennifer Abras (Navy NAVAIR), Eric Lynch (Navy NAVAIR), and  David O’Brien (Army AED), officially received the NASA Group Achievement Award during ceremonies held last October at NASA Langley Research Center.

It's official. This photo was taken in Washington, D.C. as Lieuwen, already a Regents Professor, was named to the NAE.