Student Awards, Fellowship Campaign Announced at Reliability Alumni Meeting

About 30 local reliability engineering alumni attended the Department of Mechanical Engineering's first reliability engineering alumni event to present student awards and introduce a fundraising campaign to coincide with next year’s reliability engineering education conference celebrating the program’s 25 years at the University of Maryland.

Next year’s reliability engineering celebration will be held from April 1 to 2 at the University of Maryland. On April 1 there will be an invitation-only workshop covering four topic areas that include frontiers of reliability and risk engineering; risk-informing regulations, oversight and emergency response; challenges in safety and reliability of complex systems and reliability education. That evening there will be an alumni reunion and VIP reception. On April 2 expert panels will report the results of the workshops.

As part of next year’s celebration, the department launched a campaign to raise funds for a Reliability Engineering Alumni Fellowship to "increase our ability to attract the best students in the field," said Ali Mosleh, mechanical engineering professor and director of the Center for Risk and Reliability.

The following reliability engineering students were honored at the event:

Yuandan Li - C. Raymond Knight Best Conference Paper Award for "Simulation of Nuclear Power Plant Operators Reasoning Process for Situation Assessment in ADS-IDAC Dynamic PRA Platform"
(Advisor: Ali Mosleh)

Elaheh Rabiei – Pratt & Whitney Fellowship in Reliability Engineering
(Advisor: Mohammad Modarres)

Richard Strunz - C. Raymond Knight Best Journal Paper Award for "A Reliability as an Independent Variable (RAIV) Methodology for Optimizing Test Planning for Liquid Rocket Engines"
(Advisor: Jeffrey Herrmann)