Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Center Honored

The Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Center has been selected to receive the American Helicopter Society's Grover E. Bell Award this year. This award is given "to foster and encourage research and experimentation in helicopter development to the person or persons making an outstanding contribution to the field." The Center was given this prestigious award for its pioneering fundamental contributions in smart structures technologies that had a successful transition into helicopter systems.

The award will consist of a gold medal, a certificate, and an honorarium. The award will be presented at the Annual Forum of the American Helicopter Society, June 12, 2002 at the Palais des Congres, Montreal, Canada. The Mechanical Engineering faculty members who have contributed to the Gessow Rotorcraft Center are: Profs. Balakumar Balachandran, Amr Baz, Abhijit Dasgupta, and former Prof. James Sirkis; other Maryland faculty include: Profs. E. Atkins, J. Baeder, R. Celi, A. Gessow, I. Chopra, P.S. Krishnaprasad, J. Leishman, D. Pines, L.G. Salamanca-Riba, R. Sanner, F. Schmitz, A. Vizzini, N. Wereley, and M. Wuttig.

This award is as a result of successful completion of two major smart structures programs; URI (1991-96) with team members from the University of Maryland 's Aerospace, Mechanical, Materials, and Electrical Engineering departments and UMBC's Mechanical Engineering department; and MURI (1996-2002) with team members from the University of Maryland 's Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering departments, along with faculty from Penn State and Cornell. Both of these programs were sponsored by the Army Research Office and spurred an enormous growth of smart structures activities on this campus. This award is a recognition of excellent team contributions from this campus in the area of smart structures.

Published May 10, 2002