| MAD Center >> People >> Executive Committee Members |
MAD Center: People
The college and industry have established an executive committee for the MAD Center, to help faculty and graduate students work productively with their industrial counterparts. The committee will pass information from member companies to faculty and graduate students about research areas needing attention, and, likewise, pass faculty proposals to industries to determine whether research topics answer at least one committee member's needs.Once the committee identifies a match between industrial needs and a faculty member's interest, the faculty member will work to secure federal or state, partial or full, funding for the research project. The committee will thus have almost complete control of the proposed MAD fellowship program.
As its first project, the center put together a proposal to NASA for a graduate Multidisciplinary Design Fellowship (MDF) program. Along with 19 other universities, we have won the first phase of $50,000 from NASA to create the center, its advisory board, and the proposal. The second phase MDF proposal, asked for $200,000 per year for three years. NASA expects to fund five such proposals from the 20 first-phase winners
The MAD center has a director and a faculty board that will take into consideration two factors in deciding on the distribution of fellowships. The first will be the recommendation of the industrial board; the second, the readiness of a company to provide the student working on the project with opportunities to spend adequate time on its premises with an industrial mentor. We propose that the lion's share of the monies from NASA go towards funding graduate student assistantships the board recommends.
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Prof. Rakesh K. Kapania (Director) Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering Email: rkapania@vt.edu |
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Prof. Zafer Gurdal Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics Email: zgurdal@vt.edu |
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Prof. Chris Hall Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering Email: cdhall@vt.edu |
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Prof. William Mason Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering Email: whmason@vt.edu |
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Prof. Joseph A. Schetz Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering Email: ptiger@vt.edu |
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Prof. Craig Woolsey Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering Email: cwoolsey@vt.edu |