Dr. Janis Terpenny is the Director of the Center for e-Design and Site Director for Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). She joined the Department of Engineering Education with faculty affiliate positions in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech in 2004. Formerly she served on the faculty of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to that, she was a visiting assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at Virginia Tech, where she also earned her Ph.D. with an emphasis in manufacturing systems and engineering design. She brings a wealth of industry experience to the Center with more than nine years of experience with General Electric (GE), including the completion of a two-year corporate information systems management training program, receiving a recognition award for outstanding performance. Professor Terpenny’s research is focused on environments and methods to support modeling and decision making in early design, including: knowledge environments, function-based design methods, product families and platforms, predicting and managing technology and component obsolescence, and methods for evaluating design concepts considering performance, life-cycle issues and economics.

Dr. Terpenny was selected as a College of Engineering Faculty Fellow in 2006 and selected for the AdvanceVT Leadership Development Program at Virginia Tech in 2005. She received several awards for advising and service from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has been listed in several editions of Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in Engineering Education. She won the National Best Conference Paper Award from the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Engineering Economy Division in 2002. She currently serves as the Design Economics area editor for The Engineering Economist. She is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), a senior member of the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE), ASEE, the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), and Alpha Pi Mu (the industrial engineering honor society).

Dr. Terpenny has served as principal or co-principal investigator on more than $5 million of research sponsored by the National Science Foundation, GE, Kollmorgen Electro-Optical, Pratt & Whitney, Telaxis Communications, Apprentice Systems, Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, and the Center for Excellence in Undergraduate Education at Virginia Tech. She has published over 75 scholarly publications, and has served on review panels for seven divisions/programs at the National Science Foundation in engineering and education. Terpenny has been a reviewer for more than a dozen journals and numerous conferences and has been an invited participant or co-leader of several National Science Foundation sponsored workshops. Professor Terpenny has been a leader in educational change to increase information technology and industry participation in the engineering curriculum, and to increase the recruitment and retention of women in engineering.

Dr. Michael R. Lovell is the Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Industrial Engineering in the School of Engineering. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 1994 from the University of Pittsburgh. He joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at Pittsburgh, in January of 2000 after three years of service as an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kentucky and four years of service as a senior software developer at ANSYS Inc.

Dr. Lovell is a W. K. Whiteford Endowed Faculty Fellow, has served as the Executive Director of the Swanson Center for Product Innovation since May of 2000, and has been the Director of the Swanson Institute for Technical Excellence since September of 2002. Among his accomplishments, Professor Lovell is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award (1997), the SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award (1999), and won the Outstanding International Publication on Bearings (1998). Dr. Lovell's primary research interests are in the areas of numerical simulation, novel manufacturing processes, tribology, and micro and nano technology.

Dr. Ian R. Grosse is one of the co-directors of the Center for e-Design and the site director for the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). He joined the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at UMass in 1987 as an assistant professor. He received his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University in 1979, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1983 and 1987, respectively. From 1979 – 1982 Professor Grosse was a research and development engineer for StorageTek (Louisville, CO). Professor Grosse’s research is in the area of CAD and computer aided engineering (CAE), particularly with respect to improving the interoperability of CAD and CAE tools and improving the ability of manufacturing companies to reuse, adapt, and collaborate on CAE models in a distributed environment.

Dr. Grosse has received several professional awards and been active in professional service. In 1993 he received the Outstanding Teaching Award for the College of Engineering. In 1990 and 2003 he won National Best Conference Paper awards from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Computers and Information in Engineering Conference. He is a member of ASME and past member of SAE, ASEE, and Sigma Xi Honorary Society. For many years Professor Grosse served as faculty advisor for SAE at UMass, directing the SAE supermileage vehicle project to build the world’s most fuel efficient vehicle. Professor Grosse also served as Graduate Program Director for the Mechanical & Industrial Engineering Department from 1999 – 2002.

Dr. Grosse has served as principal or co-principal investigator on more than $3 million of research sponsored by the National Science Foundation, General Electric Fund, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, United Technologies Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation, Rome Laboratory, Beloit Systems, Kidder Stacy, Raytheon Corporation, BAE Systems, Vistagy, Inc., Parametric Technology Corporation, and the University of Massachusetts. Professor Grosse has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal and peer-reviewed proceeding publications. He has served as a reviewer for over a dozen journals and numerous conferences, served on NSF review panels, and chaired many conference sessions.

Dr. Christopher D. Geiger is one of the Co-Directors of the Center for e-Design and the Site Director for the University of Central Florida (UCF). He joined the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems at UCF in 2004 as an Assistant Professor after two years as an Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, NC. He received his B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from North Carolina A&T in 1992 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN in 1995 and 2001, respectively. Dr. Geiger’s current research interests include operations scheduling and capacity planning models, distributed systems coordination for system-of-systems applications, multiobjective optimization and heuristic optimization.

From 1993 to 1998, Dr. Geiger completed various industrial projects at Ford Motor Company and served as a computer simulation consultant for Delphi Automotive Systems – Delco Electronics and Safety Division (formerly Delco Electronics Corporation). During this time, he also spent approximately two years at Intel Corporation, where he helped implement and evaluate production scheduling policies and inventory management strategies for an integrated circuit test site and a high-volume semiconductor wafer fabrication facility.

Many of his research efforts have been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Army Research Laboratory, Office of Naval Research, Intel Corporation and Siemens Power Generation. Dr. Geiger has published the results of his research in reputable technical archival journals, and he regularly presents at technical conferences including the National Meeting for the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) Annual Industrial Engineering Research Conference.

Dr. Geiger has participated on NSF review panels, served as a technical reviewer for several journals and conferences, and organized and chaired many conference sessions. Currently, he serves as the Faculty Advisor for the IIE student chapter at UCF. Dr. Geiger remains an active member of INFORMS, IIE and American Society for Engineering Education professional societies.

Dr. James F. Antaki, is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering with a courtesy appointment in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He also holds academic positions in the Departments of Surgery and Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. He received a B.S. in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1985) and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh (1991). Over the past 20 years, Dr. Antaki has conducted research in the field of prosthetic cardiovascular organs.

In 1997, his team completed the development of a novel magnetically levitated turbodynamic blood pump, the Streamliner, which recorded the world’s first in-vivo implant of such a device, and was granted an IEEE Controls Systems Technology Award in 2001. Dr. Antaki was also closely involved with the development of several other ventricular assist devices in clinical use, including the HeartMate-II and HeartQuest.

Since upgrading to Carnegie Mellon in 2003, he has intensified his interest in advancing the methodology by which medical devices are designed. He has recently founded the Laboratory for Innovation and Optimization of Medical Devices which seeks to promote creative collaborations between medical professionals, industrial partners, and faculty experts in the field of design.

Dr. Antaki holds 16 patents and has published over 85 papers related to artificial organs and other fields. He was recently recognized as one of the top 40 most influential people under age 40 in the Pittsburgh region. For the past several years, Dr. Antaki has been teaching the Capstone Design course within the Department of Bioengineering. He is a proponent of teaching methods that promote the integration of didactic coursework with industrial mentorship, aimed at solving practical problems in biomedicine, with particular emphasis on engineering of medical devices.