Dr. John H. Lienhard V, associate professor of mechanical engineering, has received a $10,000 W.M. Keck Foundation Award for Engineering Teaching Excellence.
Twenty of the awards were made by the Los Angeles-based foundation to engineering schools across the country to enable them to recognize outstanding teachers.
Dr. Lienhard joined the faculty in 1988 as an assistant professor after receiving his PhD in applied mechanics from the University of California at San Diego. He was promoted to associate professor in 1991.
His honors include a Presidential Young Investigator Award in1988-93, the George N. Hatsopoulos Junior Faculty Chair in Thermodynamics in 1988-91, the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award from the Society of Automotive Engineers in 1992, the Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Award in 1993 and the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award in 1994. He is co-author of the textbook, Mechanical Measurements, and has written a chapter on mass transfer for the textbook, A Heat Transfer Textbook.
Dr. Julie Theriot, a scientist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, is the 1994 recipient of the Women in Cell Biology Junior Award from the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). The national award is given annually to "a woman at the beginning stages of her career who has demonstrated potential for outstanding scientific contribution in her field." A 1988 alumna of MIT with degrees in physics and biology, Dr. Theriot completed her PhD in cell biology at the University of California at San Francisco before being selected as a Whitehead Fellow.
MIT faculty members and former students were well represented among award recipients at the annual convention of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Dr. Andrew J. Whittle, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, received two awards. He won the Arthur Casagrande Professional Development Award and he was co-recipient, with a retired MIT faculty member and a former student, of the J. James R. Croes Medal.
The Casagrande award provides professional development opportunities for outstanding young practitioners, researchers and teachers of geotechnical engineering. The Croes medal commends authors of exceptional papers contributing to engineering science. Professor Whittle was recognized for his superior work developing new tools for modeling and understanding the behavior of deep excavation in soft clay. His research used advanced models of soil behavior to interpret the ground movement around deep excavations for the Post Office Garage in Boston.
Dr. Whittle shared the medal with Robert Whitman, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering and a senior lecturer at MIT, and Youssef Hashash of San Francisco, an engineer. The research was part of Dr. Hashash's PhD work at MIT.
Another MIT faculty member, Dr. Alexander H. Slocum, Alex d'Arbeloff Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, was the co-recipient of the society's Thomas Fitch Rowland Prize.
He and John G. Everett, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan and a 1991 PhD recipient at MIT, were cited for their paper on the CRANIUM video system. The system mounts a video camera at the top of a crane boom, pointing down toward the load and the signal person. A television monitor inside the operator's cab allows the operator to see what is happening at the lifting point at all times, which improves crane productivity and safety.
A version of this article appeared in the November 2, 1994 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 39, Number 10).
