Engineering Education "Today in History" Leary and Roddenberry and inner and outer space
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice M. Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (100) · April 21st, 2008 · Add a Comment
Today in History - April 21, 1997 - Timothy Leary and Gene Roddenberry launched into orbit. LSD guru Timothy Leary and “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry (left image) hitched a ride into space, along with 22 other people as part of a new commercial “memorial space flight” venture of Texas-based Celestis Inc. The Spanish Pegasus rocket took off from the Canary Islands and propelled ashes of the “founders flight” into orbit, contained within small lipstick-size vials (center image) that would orbit the Earth for six years and then completely burn up when they re-entered the atmosphere. Roddenberry and Leary were ideal candidates for the first memorial space flight, with careers that focused on “outer” and “inner” space, respectively.
Although this experiment in spreading the ashes of cremated dignitaries into space got all of the publicity, the main mission of the launch was a joint project between the University of California-Berkeley and a Spanish aerospace institute with the goal of launching Spain’s first research satellite.
Also on this date in 1994, the first extra-solar planets were discovered. These planets were orbiting a neutron star, PSR B1257+12, during a large search for pulsars conducted in 1990 with the giant, 305-m Arecibo radiotelescope.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on extra-solar planets, pulsars and aerospace engineering. For curricular resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education community site.
Tags: Aerospace Engineering · General Engineering, Engineering Science
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