First-Hand:History of an ASEE Fellow - Robert H. Todd

History of an ASEE Fellow

Robert H. Todd

As of June 8, 2018

Birthplace: Los Angeles, California

Birth date: July 6, 1942

Family

I was born of very remarkable and special parents and grew up in North Hollywood, California. My father was an electrician at Universal Studios for 39 years, and I grew up in a setting where I was exposed to the excitement of learning, especially learning about the way things worked.

My father was born in Fairview, New Jersey, and my mother was born in Henderson, Kentucky. Both had moved with their respective families to Southern California fairly early in their lives—my father when he was sixteen, and my mother when she was just two. My father had an older brother who had moved from New Jersey to California to work as a cameraman in the early stages of the motion picture industry in Southern California. My uncle received a patent for the first electrically powered motion picture camera. My uncle also got my father a job in the studios soon after he arrived in California with the rest of his family. My father’s family bought a home at 819 Vista Street in Hollywood. My mother graduated from Hollywood High School and then worked as a bookkeeper until they met and were later married in 1933.

My siblings included an older sister and a younger brother. My father and mother always encouraged the three of us as children in our many interests. We did a lot of learning by doing. My parents also taught us how to work. My father had a small shop in our backyard. I was allowed to use my dad’s tools to make things as long as I would put his tools away—a lesson it took me some time to learn! Although my interest in figuring out how things worked and in making things, was different than my brother and sister, I got along well with both of them. We played lots of softball on our front lawn and earned a little money doing chores around our home. My father and mother would take us on trips once or twice a year and we enjoyed our time together as a family. My father would often take us on Friday nights to see a ‘double-feature’ at the movies. He would often comment to us after the show about some of the technical aspects of the lighting which he was familiar with.

When I was seven years old, I built my first go-kart with a friend my own age, and by the time I was ten, I had built a nineteen-room treehouse in our backyard, even equipped with electric lights! At age twelve, my parents allowed me to buy my first car, a 1930 Model A Ford Sport Coupe, for $10.00. This purchase was made with the understanding that I would take the car apart and use it to learn about how automobiles were designed and made. The car didn’t run so my father and mother had to pull it home and into our back yard behind the shop. It didn’t take me long to realize that, as I took things apart on the car, I could use some additional help in my learning efforts. I decided to go to our neighborhood garage where my mom & dad had their cars worked on and ask for a job! I explained that I would be happy to work for nothing, if I could just learn about cars. The two men who owned the shop were very kind to me and agreed that I could work for them, and they would teach me. My father signed a paper that if I got hurt while working at the shop, they would not be responsible.

I worked four hours a day, it being the summertime, and I was out of school. After two weeks I even started to receive a wage of $0.25/hour, which was probably more than what I was worth at the time! I learned mostly by asking lots of questions, by observation and by doing. I swept the floor, cleaned automobile parts, sorted used nuts and bolts, and yes, put tools away for the two mechanics who were the shop owners. I learned how carburetors and distributors worked. I learned how to do brake jobs and valve jobs and eventually even engine overhauls. I became fascinated with transmissions and differentials observing first-hand how they were designed and worked. In school I was learning about science and mathematics, but in the shop, I was learning how these disciplines were applied to the machine that had helped changed the world—the automobile!

As these formative years passed, I would work full-time in the summer and several hours a day after school and on Saturdays. I also got to rebuild the engine from my Model A and installed it in another Model A that was lacking an engine that I was also allowed to buy. It was a 1930 Model A Ford Coupe. My older sister drove my Model A to North Hollywood High School when she was in high school, as I was in junior high and not yet old enough to drive.

When I was sixteen, the State of California invoked the law of Eminent Domain and purchased our home to build the Ventura Freeway through the San Fernando Valley. I can well remember my father buying our home and all that was on our property back from the State at an auction held on our front lawn. We then moved our home, after cutting it into three pieces, and remodeled it on a three-acre plot of orange trees located near Hansen Dam in the northern part of the San Fernando valley. This was about twelve miles from its original North Hollywood location.

Education

I enjoyed school very much and took as many of the shop, science and math classes as were offered at North Hollywood Jr. High. I enjoyed math and science and especially drafting. As a result of our move after finishing junior high, I attended the John H. Francis Polytechnic High School and graduated in January of 1960. I had continued my work at the auto shop through high school and knew by then that I wanted to become an engineer. I can well remember the announcement over the high school PA system when I was headed to my physics class in 1957 that the Russians had just launched Sputnik.

During my early school years, I suppose, I was developing a philosophy of education. I came to believe that, at least for me, I couldn’t really fully understand something unless I learned some theory behind it and then had the opportunity to put that theory into practice. Learning how things were modeled was an important step, but putting that model into practice, with real hardware, and making something work, made all the difference in my understanding of what was really happening.

After high school, I attended Los Angeles Valley Jr. College for one semester because I had graduated from high school mid-year. I took 19 ½ credits my first semester as an engineering major, still worked part-time at the shop, and played in a youth band. I toured Europe with this band just before the Berlin Wall was put up. I had learned to play the trombone starting in elementary school and continued in junior high, high school, and college. I had played in each of these school bands even during my first year of graduate school, encouraged by my father who also played the saxophone.

In the fall of 1960 I started my second semester of college at San Fernando Valley State College in the school’s first engineering class. At SFVSC, all of us majored in General Engineering, but we could choose an emphasis area. I choose mechanics and materials. I loved my classes in physics, statics, dynamics and especially strength of materials. We had wonderful professors who were available almost anytime, to answer our questions. Once again, I was seeing the theory behind things and then often seeing how they had been put into practice with my work at the shop as a part-time mechanic.

During my third year, I decided I wanted to become a teacher. I had always been influenced to do my best by my teachers and this was especially true of my undergraduate engineering professors at Valley State (now, Cal State at Northridge).

As a boy when I had made my nineteen-room tree house, my 4th grade teacher, Mr. Fletcher, heard about my tree house and asked if he could come and see it at my home. Can you imagine the influence and impact of having your 4th grade teacher come to your home and climb up into your treehouse asking you questions about it and having you show him around?

I received the Most Outstanding Graduating Engineering Student Award in 1964 in the first engineering class at Cal State Northridge. With the encouragement of my professors, I decided to go on to graduate school instead of accepting one of the several offers I had to go to work in the aerospace industry. During my undergraduate studies each summer I found summer jobs working in industry as an engineer in training, in addition to my part-time work as an auto mechanic. I wanted to get as much practical experience as I could. I also wanted to learn how design decisions were made in industry. I had several wonderful engineering jobs working in the aerospace industry during those summers. I even had the privilege of working on the test stand for the F1 engine that was used to take us to the moon in 1969, working one summer at Rocketdyne which was at the time, part of the North American Aviation Corporation. The space race was on, and I was involved in it as a student and in my summer jobs.

I was accepted at several universities for graduate school and choose Stanford because of its reputation in solid body mechanics and stress analysis, subjects which I had become even more interested in as an undergraduate student.

While a senior at Cal State Northridge, I was invited by a friend, Carl Fischer, to attend an institute class on the Book of Mormon. I had studied with Carl as an engineering student and had known other members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and respected them. I accepted Carl’s invitation. Carl Fischer later became the President of the Aerojet General Corporation and is a good friend today.

I read the Book of Mormon and became convinced that it was what it claimed to be—a record of ancient prophet’s writings who had lived on the American continent, and another witness of Jesus Christ. I gained a testimony that the Book of Mormon was tangible evidence that there had been an apostasy of Jesus Christ’s original church following his death and that the Church of Jesus Christ had been restored to the earth in our day in preparation for the Savior’s second coming. In addition, the church had been restored with the same authority or priesthood, built upon prophets and apostles, Jesus Christ being the chief cornerstone.

I started my master’s degree at Stanford taking three quarters or about nine months to complete the degree in Engineering Mechanics. I had remarkable professors at Stanford, including Miklos Hetenyi, Thomas Kane, Donovan Young and the influence of Stephen P. Timoshenko who had recently retired before I arrived. My advisor was James Norman Goodier who had written the remarkable classic with Timoshenko, Theory of Elasticity. I studied the theory of plates and shells, advanced strength of materials, dynamics, structures, fluid mechanics, experimental stress analysis, control theory and more. Stanford was a haven for learning from great professors in solid body mechanics who, once again, seemed to always have time to help students who really wanted to learn.

In January of 1965 at Stanford, I was offered an assistantship to obtain a PhD with Henry Fuchs, who had come to Stanford from UCLA, but previously had been the founder and President of the Metal Improvement Company. He had spent most of his career in industry after obtaining his PhD in Germany. His research area was metal fatigue and the influence of residual stresses on the fatigue strength of metals.

At first, I accepted his offer, but as I got closer to the end of my M.S. studies, I had the impression that I felt I wanted to serve as a missionary for my new-found church. This seemed to defy all logic given my offer to obtain a PhD from Stanford, all paid for.

But the desire to serve a mission persisted, and so I turned down the assistantship. I was told at the time by the Mechanical Engineering department that I probably couldn’t return to Stanford, much less return with any financial help. It took some faith to serve a mission for me, as it does for all young men and women who serve as young missionaries. I suppose for me it was especially challenging as I knew I wanted to become a professor of engineering; I knew also that obtaining a PhD was pretty much a prerequisite. I received a call to serve in the Florida mission. At that time, the Florida Mission geographically included all of Florida, the lower one-third of Georgia and Mobile, Alabama plus all of the Caribbean Islands including Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Bahamas, etc. I was twenty-three years old the day I entered the mission home in Orlando, Florida.

My mission meant everything to me in terms of my growth, education and learning. I learned how to better work with people and about people. I learned more deeply the doctrines of Christ. I learned about learning! I learned how to study even better than I ever had before, and I even learned how to work better! I learned, as President Boyd K. Packer later taught, “True doctrine, understood, will do more to change behavior than a discussion of behavior.”

Near the end of my two-year mission serving in Florida, I received a letter from the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford indicating that Dr. Henry Fuchs had arranged for a better assistantship and a better project for me to work on if I would be willing to return and continue my studies in Mechanical Engineering Design. It was a remarkable opportunity and blessing. I knew, even more, that I wanted to become an engineering professor. However, I also knew that in returning to Stanford I would be competing with some of the best students in the country. I also knew these students had been studying partial differential equations and lots of engineering theory classes while I had been away for two years learning how to work with people using the gospel of Jesus Christ to help them change their lives. I was also aware that I had to take the PhD qualifying exams upon my return to Stanford within that first year back. I decided to accept the offer and move forward with faith. I returned to Stanford in the fall of 1967 and started my PhD program.

I should interject here that when I had returned from my two-year mission, I worked for the summer in Utah at the Kennecott Corporation at their Molybdic Oxide Rhenium Recovery facility. The day I started my summer job, the non-salaried employees went on strike. Within two weeks, all of Kennecott’s summer hires were laid-off, except one—me. Had I been laid off, I would have returned to my home in California and probably worked at the shop for the remainder of the summer before returning to Stanford, but I was not laid-off. I met my wife-to-be on the first Sunday in August in church.

I was sitting in the congregation next to the mother of one of the missionary companions I had as a missionary, who was still serving his mission. I had, in fact, been invited by my companion’s parents to stay with them in their home in Bountiful, Utah for the summer while I worked at Kennecott before going back to Stanford.

As I sat in the congregation, I saw a young woman enter the other end of the room, and I asked my companion’s mother why she hadn’t introduced me to her. She had introduced me to about every young woman she knew (since she knew I was 25 years old and single and was returning to Stanford to start my PhD). She then said, and I quote, “Oh, that’s Janell. I am saving her for my son.” I teased her back and challenged her to invite this young woman (Janell) to dinner at their home that evening and she did!

Just before dinner I picked up Janell at her home just a few blocks away and we drove to the place where I was staying, for Sunday dinner with my missionary companion’s family. It was a bit awkward because I also had another date later that evening, and so I had to take Janell back home shortly after we finished our Sunday dinner with the family.

It is hard for me to find words adequate to express how at ease, comfortable and uplifted I felt when I was with Janell. I asked her out just a few days after we had first met, and we started our courtship. When I was with Janell, I wanted to be a better person and just being with her inspired me to be better.

As the fall came, I left in my mother’s borrowed car for home in Southern California and bought a used 1966 Volkswagen; then left for Stanford in Palo Alto, California.

Janell and I continued our courtship via letters in the mail during that first academic year. She came to Palo Alto that next summer to work as a temporary secretary and lived with some other single young girls in the Stanford Ward during that summer. We were engaged to be married in October of 1968 and married in the Salt Lake Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for time and all eternity, on the 29th of January 1969 in the middle of my PhD studies.

My PhD program was a remarkable experience for me. I had a fascinating problem to solve with my advisor, Dr. Henry Fuchs, and exceptional classes in a variety of topics. I audited classes in subjects I had taken two years previously to assist me in preparing for the PhD qualifying exams. I also met with other students working to prepare.

I should briefly describe a little of what the PhD qualifying exams were like in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford at that time. They were oral exams. We were required to choose, if I remember correctly, 5 subjects. Math was required of everyone plus four others. The exams were formatted such a way that, you as a PhD candidate, were put in an office with two professors while they would simply ask you questions, and to solve problems. These sessions lasted about 45 minutes to an hour for each topic, except for the design exam which lasted 4 hours. You stood at the chalkboard and responded to their questions. It was a little like, “being a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.” I was simply numb during the experience and afterwards had no idea how I had done.

There were 16 of us that took the exams that year. I was told that evening in a phone call from my advisor, that although the results were not final yet, I should not worry as I had done well. I learned later that 9 of us had passed.

My research project was to find a way to model, with the intent to predict, residual stresses and their distribution in axisymmetric machine parts, that had in their shape, things like notches, which produced stress concentrations in the part. These parts had intentionally been processed to produce residual stresses in the part from processes like shot peening, carburizing, or case hardening, etc.

With the previous work of E.L. Wilson at Cal Berkeley, I devised a finite element program that could successfully predict the distribution of residual stresses in axisymmetric parts with stress concentrations caused by plastic deformation. My modeling results were verified by experimental stress analysis work done using X-Ray diffraction techniques at the Caterpillar Tractor Corporation in Peoria, Illinois.

At the time, finite element analysis was in its infancy. My work was a good step forward in being able to help model stresses in actual machine parts that had been subjected to plastic deformation processing to improve their fatigue strength in real-life applications. It was a great project for me because I had excellent people to work with, superb computing tools at Stanford, and it brought theory and practice together in an effort to improve the design of actual machine parts.

I received my PhD in January of 1971 about 3 years and 4 months after I had returned to Stanford after serving as a Mormon missionary.

I accepted a Post-Doctoral fellowship to continue my work at Stanford in the Center for Materials Research, with additional funding from the Advanced Projects Research Agency of The Department of Defense. I also had the opportunity to begin to write engineering case studies for use in engineering education while I started my job search.

Employment

I had industrial offers from The General Motors Corporation and others. GM wanted me to continue my work in the development of the finite element method applied to plastic deformations, as they would occur in crash analysis of vehicles. I knew I wanted to teach; so it was a wrestle for me to decide whether to go directly into teaching or into industry and then later into teaching.

I had worked with a wonderful man, serving in the Church, during my PhD program as a graduate student at Stanford by the name of Henry B. Eyring. Dr. Eyring was a Stanford Business School Professor, and he and I served together in the Stanford Ward which was also a remarkable experience. The Stanford ward was a congregation of the church with its members being young single adults made up of students at Stanford and others living in the area. He served as the Bishop of the ward and after I was married, I served as his 2nd and then 1st counselor in the Bishopric. I developed a great respect and love for this outstanding man. When I learned from him that he had been asked by the Church to become the President of Ricks College (now BYU- Idaho), the Church’s two-year school in Idaho, I applied to teach at the school and they, too, made me an offer. They were interested in having me teach math and physics and to formulate the beginnings of a pre-engineering program at Ricks. During my job search I was also offered a teaching position at my undergraduate school, Cal State, Northridge.

After some thoughtful prayer and discussion, my wife and I decided to accept the offer at Ricks College and turned down the other offers which were all for higher salaries. We just felt that this was where we should go and serve. I wanted to work with students, and I could see that this would be a place where I would clearly have the opportunity to do so.

After one year of teaching, I was asked to serve as a Division Chairman, or Dean, of the largest portion of the student body at the school. At the time we had better than 40% of all of the students majoring in one of the disciplines of our Division, the Division of Industrial and Social Sciences. Our Division included all of the social sciences, pre-engineering, engineering technology, technology and business. It was an unusual mix, and I was the youngest of all of the faculty members in our Division, except for one. This experience provided me a marvelous learning experience. We had very good support from the administration. We were able to start several new programs as a result of student demand and feedback from industry. All of the administrative work and my teaching kept me busy!

During my eight-year tenure at Ricks College, after just a few years, the Division was divided into Industrial Sciences and a separate division for Social Sciences and Business. We continued to make good progress developing and offering new programs that helped prepare students for further education and what was ahead for them in their life’s work. It was a very fulfilling and challenging experience for me.

During this time, I developed an “Introduction to Engineering” course where I divided the students up into teams and gave the students the opportunity to find a real-life problem that the team felt they might be able to solve. Although the students didn’t have the skills yet to do a lot in engineering practice, we had excellent facilities for making things. The innovation and creativity of the students was phenomenal! They learned that they didn’t know much and used their initiative to find out what they needed to know to do their projects. They were eager to be taught! The work of the students was publicized quite well, and the students got their projects and their work published in a number of local newspaper articles. I also developed a Statics and Strength of Materials course, and I had many eager students. Our core curriculum was the traditional calculus, physics and chemistry so they could transfer to four-year programs. We also gave them a chance to get some exposure early in their undergraduate education in attempting real engineering design and build projects with limited skills on their part to begin with. I suppose this course could be seen as a precursor to “Cornerstone” courses that exist today.

After eight years of teaching, I sensed that to become a better teacher I wanted to get some additional experience in industry, really learning for myself—first hand—what engineers did. I had had a number of summer jobs, but somehow, I felt often what we were teaching in our engineering programs was not relevant enough to what engineers actually were doing in industry. There seemed to be somewhat of a disconnect between academia and industry.

I applied for a leave of absence from my teaching at Ricks. Interestingly, I had three offers from the same recruiter at General Motors, Bert Sparhawk, who had offered me a position before after I finished my PhD work at Stanford. I chose to accept the offer to work at the GM Technical Center in Manufacturing Development in the Mechanical Development Department. I saw in this a good opportunity to have variety in my work. I would also be able to see how design and manufacturing really interfaced with one another. This was particularly true in the work I would be doing at GM in designing, developing and building new manufacturing process machines for its many divisions.

During my tenure at GM I had 25 fascinating manufacturing development projects. I will take the time here to only describe two of them. At the time GM had 500 camshaft grinders at a cost of about $450,000.00 each. A very creative process engineer, Phil Arnold, whom I was working with from another department on another project, had an idea that we might be able to change the manufacturing process for grinding the precise profile on camshaft lobes if we could figure out a way to dress the 25 in. diameter aluminum oxide grinding wheel at the same time we were grinding the precision profiles on each cam lobe. My job was to figure out how this idea might be put into practice and to develop a prototype machine to demonstrate the feasibility of the new concept.

The challenge was outstanding for me as a young engineer. We had to grind each lobe to within very tight tolerances with no visible chatter. We came up with a diamond faced, cup wheeled dressing tool, oriented with its rotating axis at 90 degrees to the grinding wheel arbor. This rotating cup wheel would dress the aluminum oxide grinding wheel before the finish grind of each lobe. This would be done by using the rotating cup wheel to precisely plunge into the grinding wheel on the opposite side of the wheel as the grinding wheel was finish grinding the lobe profile on the rotating camshaft. All of this within a precision of just a few millionths of an inch.

To make a long story short, it worked! We had some problems to work out involving a chatter of about 5 millionths of an inch deep on the lobe surface, which we were eventually able to solve. We shared our idea with an equipment manufacturer and they built the first production machine for us. This machine reduced the cycle time for grinding camshafts by about 40% and saved GM a very large sum of money.

The second project I will briefly describe, was another fascinating dream project for an engineer that enjoyed the thrill of learning, innovation, creativity and design.

One day I was called into my department chair’s office and was told that GM had a ‘hot job’ and that they would like me to lead. He explained that a research physicist by the name of John Croate, at the GM Research Labs had made 2 grams of a new material that appeared to have phenomenal magnetic properties. This new material had been given the name of ‘Magnequench’. My boss explained that GM wanted to be able to produce 90,000 pounds a year of this material, within a year! I could choose anybody to be on my development team from anywhere in GM, and that money was no object! At first it appeared that the biggest challenge would be that we would have only 9 months to be ready to start debugging the processing equipment and thereafter be in production!

By this time, I had gotten to know a number of very competent engineers at GM through my other projects. So, I had some good impressions of who I might want on my team. The biggest challenge turned out to be that the process parameters for making the two grams of the material were not well understood. Being an “information gatherer engineer,” which enables better design decisions to be made, I met with John Croate and learned that the material was made up of Iron, Neodymium and a small doping of Boron.

Building a manufacturing process machine from scratch with no precedent is one thing. But designing and building a sophisticated manufacturing machine without understanding what the process really was, was quite another! In visiting with John many times, it was thought that the finished material was amorphous, meaning that it didn’t have a grain structure, but similar to glass. Electron microscope images of the material at first, indicated this. It was believed that the material was amorphous because it had been rapidly quenched. The rapid quenching process from a molten material is what allowed it to have it’s very interesting magnetic properties, once magnetized. There were a lot of unknowns and time was short! Can you imagine a more challenging and exciting opportunity for a young engineer wanting to learn about the practice of engineering?

I had an unlimited budget and a tight time frame. But I also had the resources of anybody I needed within the General Motors Corporation. The potential for the material was what drove the project. If we could figure out a way to make this material in large quantities, it could be used in starter motors, window crank motors, and in other applications substantially reducing their weight. It appeared that this “hard” magnetic material had a magnetic strength of about 30% greater than Ferrite magnets and a magnetic strength greater than Samarium Cobalt which was the strongest magnetic material known to man at the time.

Following my information gathering paradigm, I gathered as much information as I could with our team to be able to construct a manufacturing process with its critical parameters to enable us to make our design decisions.

I started to learn all I could about magnetic materials in general, and how they were made. I learned that Battelle Labs in Columbus, Ohio, for example, had made “soft” magnetic materials using a rapid solidification process. I reasoned that maybe a similar process might enable us to develop a process to make this unique ‘hard’ magnetic material. An additional challenge we learned about was that Neodymium is very reactive at high temperatures. This fact would necessitate doing whatever process we did come up with, in either a vacuum or in an inert atmosphere.

The term ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ as applied to magnetic materials, referred to the energy required to magnetize the material once it was made and its ability to retain its magnetism once magnetized. ‘Soft’ magnetic materials are relatively easy to magnetize, but ‘hard’ magnetic materials take more energy to magnetize but also retain their magnetism better once magnetized.

Soft magnetic materials are used in transformers where the polarity of the magnetic material is changed rapidly based on the frequency of the alternating current being transformed from one voltage to another. ‘Hard’ magnetic materials are used in permanent magnetic motors and applications where you want to retain the magnetism of the material and not have it change. GM’s Magnequench material was totally new at the time and our work became quite confidential. Today Magnequench magnets are known as ‘Neodymium’ magnets and are fairly common. There is much that went on behind the scenes on this vast project that I don’t have the space to share here.

We ended up with a team of about twenty people working on the project, and to make a complex and highly intense story short, we were debugging the prototype manufacturing process equipment with the process we had also devised, about eight months later. A division of General Motors, Delco Remy, became our customer and we installed our prototype equipment at their Andersen, Indiana, facility and started the debugging and testing process.

About this time, I was approached by a head hunter who wanted me to come to Greenville, South Carolina, for an interview. I told the head hunter several times that I was having too much fun in my work, was quite busy, and that I was not looking for any change in my employment. I knew that I wanted to return to my teaching and research—this was the reason in the first place I had chosen to spend a good chunk of time working in industry—but this would be an opportunity with a multinational corporation and not a university.

To this day, I have no idea how the head hunter got my name. Nevertheless, he persisted to the point that my wife and I finally decided it wouldn’t hurt to just listen to whatever the company had to say. We flew to Greenville, South Carolina for a long weekend in the spring of 1984. I met with the President of the Michelin Tire Corporation for North America. Michelin, a privately-owned tire manufacturer, wanted to have me come to work for them as the Director of Manufacturing Development for North America. They also wanted to about double my salary.

GM had been paying me very well, my projects were fascinating, and I had been given management responsibilities along with my technical work. I was not looking for a new job or for more money. I had received a number of awards at GM for my work, and my work on a number of previous projects was very challenging and fulfilling. I later learned that GM was planning to start a new division, and that I was to have been offered a “vice-president-of-manufacturing” position with this new division.

Nevertheless, my family and I decided to accept the position at Michelin after learning more about Michelin and also because of an interest that I had had for many years to learn a foreign language. My wife and I, once again, had a spiritual impression that this was something we should do. We moved our precious family of 7 children, ages 1-14 to Greenville, South Carolina, and prepared for a one year ‘stage’ experience in Clermont-Ferrand, France, at Michelin’s world headquarters, the world’s largest tire manufacturer. I found Michelin to be an exceptionally superb company to work for. I had never previously realized the complexity and precision associated with making radial tires and the manufacturing equipment required to do so. I was given several ‘stage’ projects while in France that enabled me to get to know the culture of the company by dealing with very capable people and the technical aspects of complex projects associated with manufacturing development. I began to learn the French language. All of my work was in French and learning a foreign language was a steep curve for me. It is to this day! Our older children attended the Michelin America School and the younger ones attended the local French school. Michelin provided us a large home to live in and one extra day a month of vacation time to see and experience Europe as well as an allowance for a vehicle. We left for France from Greenville, South Carolina, in the spring of 1985.

At Christmastime, we had the privilege of bringing our family of 7 children to visit my parents in California and also my wife’s family in Utah, all paid for by Michelin. They treated us exceptionally well, and I was learning many new things about the development and complexity of very sophisticated manufacturing processing equipment.

At GM I had been impressed with the capability and competence of the engineers I had worked with. I learned a tremendous amount of practical engineering practice lessons. I became even more impressed with the competence of the engineers at Michelin. The sophistication of the manufacturing equipment was remarkable and stood head and shoulders above what I had ever seen before anywhere in my life.

After our year in France, we returned to Greenville, South Carolina, Michelin’s North American Headquarters, and I became the Director of Manufacturing Development for an expansion of the quality assurance system at Michelin in North America.

Michelin is a company fastidious about quality, and their automated quality assurance capability was the best I had ever seen in the world. For example, every single tire is made with a unique bar code—somewhat like each of us, as individuals, has a unique social security number. This bar code is used to record performance data for each individual tire once it has been built and then mounted and tested. A marvelously sophisticated tire uniformity testing machine that Michelin had developed measured 8 different parameters in 16 different harmonics to provide feedback for each automated manufacturing process step in the manufacture of that specific tire. This was ‘In process control,’ but at a phenomenal level, given the nature of the materials and processes involved in building a complex composite product out of elastomers and steel!

My assignments at Michelin were very rewarding and challenging. I was involved in some travel to the 8 manufacturing plants in North America at the time and would return to Michelin’s headquarters in France from time to time, as well.

Because Michelin is a very secretive company with respect to their manufacturing processes, I won’t go into detail other than to say, I had worked with a number of companies who were suppliers to GM and had seen—first-hand—the phenomenal supply chain competence of automotive suppliers especially located in the Mid-west of the Unites States, but really throughout the world.

Michelin was most impressive. Being a private company, they had created a culture to do much of what they did, in-house and to devote much of their profit into improvement of their product and their processes. I had never seen a company who had done this to the degree that Michelin had done, and I believe still does today.

As time went on and I was given more and more responsibility with manufacturing development at Michelin. I became responsible for developing a new generation of tire uniformity machines with an outside company (which was a first at Michelin) and other projects. My salary and responsibilities continued to climb, and I felt I was certainly paid much more than I was worth.

Over the years I had had contact with several faculty members at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and I was approached by BYU asking if I would serve on an industrial advisory board, which I was pleased to do. As time went on, BYU eventually offered me a teaching and research position to assist in developing a new Manufacturing Engineering program they were interested to start.

I saw this as an opportunity to return to teaching which I knew I loved. I had spent ten exciting and very fulfilling years in industry and certainly had the opportunity to learn what real practicing engineers and engineering managers did. I had been responsible for hundreds of projects and scores of engineers. I felt like now, I could say with some confidence, based on my experience, that I knew what engineers did, and what was important for them to be taught in academia, to help prepare them for graduate school as well as engineering practice and their careers.

I accepted the offer to start at BYU as an associate professor in the fall of 1989, and I also found a way ‘to reduce my income taxes’!

My work at BYU was a marvelous opportunity to use what I had learned in industry. I developed a new course in manufacturing processes and wrote two text books with Dell Allen and Leo Alting of Denmark, both based on previous work they had done together on classifying manufacturing processes. One of the books, Manufacturing Processes Reference Guide, published in 1994 became a best seller throughout the world. It was formatted to be somewhat of an encyclopedia of manufacturing processes, enabling engineers and others, to quickly learn the capabilities of various manufacturing processes. It was published by Industrial Press. I also developed a graduate course in Manufacturing Process Machine Design, that many of my graduate students took as part of their studies.

After a few years I was invited to join the Mechanical Engineering Department as a result of a decision to create a School of Technology at BYU and thereby strengthen the Engineering Technology programs at the university. Manufacturing Engineering Technology had been started at BYU in 1967 and was a leading program in the country. It was felt that having both an engineering technology and engineering program in the same discipline would dilute the effectiveness of both with respect to competition for students. There were also other important reasons at the time.

I had been serving as a Department Chair and we had started our Capstone program for our senior students in manufacturing and mechanical disciplines with feedback from industry, and I was also very busy with this effort as the founding director. I will write more about BYU’s Capstone program, developed with two young and very capable and gifted fellow BYU faculty members, Dr. Spencer Magleby and Dr. Carl Sorensen, under the section of this biography entitled, Philosophy of Engineering Education.

I became a full-professor along the way and found great fulfillment in my teaching and research with students immensely. I loved my work in industry, but my work with students was even more fulfilling.

One of the most delightful experiences in my working with students throughout my career came as a result of our Capstone Program. In addition to serving as the founding director of BYU’s Capstone program, I also had the privilege of coaching at least one capstone team a year myself. This activity kept me in touch with the students, what they were learning and was a special privilege for me. I loved working with my students!

It was decided early, based on the nature of our solicited projects from industry, that we would also have a few projects each year that would be part of national design student competitions. A number of students approached me to see if the department could sponsor an SAE Mini Baja team. Given my background with vehicles, I agreed to be the coach. Our first team used the structured design process and designed BYU’s first SAE Mini Baja vehicle and took 2nd place overall in the static and dynamic competition held that year in El Paso, Texas. This was a very unusual accomplishment for a rookie team.

Over the next eight years BYU’s teams won more 1st through 5th place finishes than any other school in the nation. One year I coached two teams, a Jr. team of non-senior students, and a Sr. team. Interestingly, the Jr. team won 1st place and beat the Sr. team!

As time went on, we decided we needed a new challenge for our students and decided to enter SAE’s Formula competition. However, we found that the rules were becoming more and more restrictive so that the teams were required to do things a specific way instead of designing to a performance outcome, which didn’t foster as much creativity.

We learned of the SAE/IEEE Dartmouth sponsored, Formula Hybrid Design competition, and saw in this competition the opportunity to design a vehicle to performance specifications, leaving the specifics of the design up to the students. We felt this paradigm would foster creativity in our students, and so with overwhelming support from students and the university, decided to enter. Our first year’s vehicle won 4th place overall which was excellent given the complexity of a hybrid vehicle and a rookie team with no experience.

Over the next three additional years, the teams did well. The second year we received encouragement from the organizers based upon our teams desire to design and build a hydraulic hybrid, which they did. However, two weeks before the competition we received a call from the organizers that they were concerned they would have no one to judge the safety of our vehicle. We would be allowed to display the vehicle but would not be allowed to compete in any of the dynamic events. This was obviously a disappointment, but the students took this in their stride, and we decided we would put our vehicle on display and help the other teams in any way we could at the competition.

Phenomenally, at the awards ceremony, which we attended out of support for the other teams, it was announced that BYU’s vehicle had won the two most prestigious design awards of the competition, one from Dartmouth University for the Most Innovative Hybrid Vehicle and the other, from the Chrysler Corporation, for the Best Engineered Hybrid vehicle. We were a bit astonished and humbled by this remarkable experience!

The next year an all new team built a parallel hybrid from scratch and won 2nd place overall, and the last year of my teaching at BYU, 2012, BYU’s team tied for first place.

My retirement came at age 70 in the fall of 2012 when my wife and I both felt that we should serve missions for our church while our health was still good. Our first mission call at our own expense came to serve as Member and Leadership Support Missionaries in Madagascar. Our assignment was to help prepare a District of the Church of about eighteen hundred members to become a Stake in Antsirabe, Madagascar. We had 5 building projects in the district and worked with the Branch and District leadership to help them learn leadership principles and good practices to enable them to become the leaders of a future Stake of the Church, the first Stake some distance away from the capital city of Antananarivo. Our work was very challenging and rewarding and we came to love these special, very hard-working and faithful people. We also worked a great deal with the young missionaries who had been called to serve in the Madagascar Antananarivo Mission in our area. These young missionaries taught many who wanted to learn about the Church. They served well and sacrificed much in their service.

Our second mission was also a marvelous experience. We were called to serve as Temple Missionaries in the Palmyra, New York Temple. We had the opportunity to see—first hand—the historical beginnings of the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ in this special setting where it all began with a fourteen-year-old boy asking God which church he should join amongst the many who taught widely different doctrines in the 1820’s. Once again, we came to love the wonderful people of Upstate New York. We learned of the Erie Canal and how it had become the lifeblood of development in this region of our country during the 1820’s and for many years following. One could say that it was the ‘internet’ of its time. It helped to make this part of our country what it is today, including New York City. All built by hand, it reduced the shipping costs of goods from the Great Lakes region to New York City to one tenth of what they had been previously.

Our third mission, which we are currently serving, is again serving as Temple Missionaries, but this time in the Papeete, Tahiti Temple. This, too, has been a fascinating and very stretching experience for us. The restored gospel of Jesus Christ was first brought to French Polynesia in 1843, just a few years after its beginning in Upstate New York, in 1830.

The church currently has about 160 operating temples throughout the world and the Tahiti Temple was dedicated in 1983. The church has 30,000 normal meeting house locations in more than 170 countries of the world for Sunday and other weekly meetings, but Temples are different. In the Temples of the Church, sacred ordinances are performed for the living and, vicariously, for the dead. In our service in the Tahiti Temple we assist in performing these ordinances. All of our work is in the French and Tahitian languages, and at age 75, it is a challenge to learn new languages, nevertheless a special privilege!

Research and Scholarship

My research and scholarship included two main areas of interest. The first area has been the improvement of the relevancy of engineering education to better prepare students for engineering practice.

The second area has been product design and development as applied to manufacturing process machines and other products. I have loved working with students and others in these two areas and several related areas in my career.

Brief Resume

Noted below is a brief one-page resume summarizing some of my research, scholarship and other activities during my professional career in academia and industry.

Robert H. Todd, Professor Emeritus

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Brigham Young University

Provo, Utah 84602

Phone: 801-373-3084 (home) E-Mail: todd@byu.edu

Education

PhD Stanford University, Mechanical Engineering, Design Division, 1971

MS Stanford University, Engineering Mechanics, 1965

BS California State University at Northridge, General Engineering, 1964 (Most Outstanding Engineering Graduate Award)

Professional Experience and Employment

Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah

1989-1 September 2012: Professor, Associate Professor—Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering
Research Interests:
- Hybrid CVT drivetrain vehicle development, Product design, Mfg. process machine design, Failure analysis
- Improving the relevancy and effectiveness of engineering education

Since coming to BYU in 1989 I have been the author or co-author of more than 100 peer reviewed articles, 2 books, more than 50 conference presentations and over 300 presentations to industry; assisted in bringing, or have brought, approximately $2,000,000 to BYU in research funding; designed and built with students, more than 30 manufacturing process and other machines; and have been the faculty chair for more than 35 completed Masters, PhD and/or honors student theses.

Courses Developed and Taught:

Design for Manufacturability; Fundamentals of International Product design & Development
Fundamentals of Manufacturing Processes
Integrated Product and Process Design (Two-semester Capstone Sr. Design Course)
Manufacturing Process Machine Design; Global Product Development (graduate courses)

While serving as the Founding Director of BYU’s Capstone course, I led a team that has brought approximately $10,000,000 in educational grants to BYU. This course has won several national awards and completed more than 600 industrially sponsored design and build projects with Sr. Engineering and Technology student teams working with industry.

Administrative/Service

Program evaluator and member of the ABET Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) 2000-2004
Member of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) Journals Committee 1999-2005
Member of ASME, SAE, ASEE (life), SME (life), Tau Beta Pi, Phi Kappa Phi
- Undergraduate Coordinator, (1998-2001), Member and/or Chair of Faculty Rank and Advancement Committee (2005-2012); Member of College Vision, Building, and Globalization Committees
Chair, Dept. of Manufacturing Engineering & Engineering Technology, (1995-1998)
Founding Director, Integrated Product and process Design (Capstone Course), (1990-1996, 2003-2012)
Associate Director, State Center of Excellence for Rapid Product Realization, (1994-1995)
Chairman, Advances in Capstone Education Conference, (1994)
Associate Director, CAM Software Research Center, (1989-1990)
Chairman, College of Engineering & Technology Alliance With Industry Conf., (1989-1990)

Honors and Awards

College of Engineering and Technology Blue Key Outstanding Faculty Member Award (1995)
BYU Karl G. Maeser Excellence in Teaching Award (2003)
Elected Fellow of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) in 2004
Elected by the students of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Excellent Educator Award (2004)
Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award, Department of Mechanical Engineering, (2005)
Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology Outstanding Citizenship Award (2012)

Michelin Tire Corporation—North American Headquarters, Greenville, SC

1983-1989 Director, Manufacturing Development, North American Operations and Manager, Quality Assurance Technical Development—Managed Central Engineering and maintenance activities to support five manufacturing plants in the United States. Responsible for major manufacturing development projects in North America. Managed development of new generation, fully flexible, tire uniformity, measurement machines and other quality assurance process machinery. Coordinated a 30% expansion of Michelin's quality assurance manufacturing capability in North America

General Motors Corporation--Advanced Engineering Staff, GM Technical Center, Warren, MI

1979-1983 Project Manager, Senior Staff Engineer, Staff Development Engineer, and Senior Project Engineer—Responsible for development of approximately 25 new manufacturing process machine, new product manufacturing development, and/or failure analysis projects

Brigham Young University–Idaho, (Formerly Ricks College) Rexburg, ID

1971-1979 Professor of Math, Physics and Engineering, Chairman, Division of Industrial Sciences and Chairman, Division of Industrial and Social Sciences—Duties similar to that of a Dean. Responsible for all departments, faculty, budgets, existing programs and development of new programs within the division which consisted of 8 departments offering 25 programs for approximately 40% of the campus. Taught Math, Physics and Engineering courses. Member of the Select Committee for The Study of Higher Education in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Stanford University—Center for Materials Research, Palo Alto, CA

1971 Post-Doctoral Fellow--Research related to fatigue of metals, material failure analysis, machine design, and the writing of case studies for use in engineering education.

Philosophy of Engineering Education

Through my many years of teaching, research, industrial experience and as a student, I have come to believe that our influence in mentoring our students has more to do with what they sense we think of them, than what we may be trying to teach them.

As important as what we teach them is—and it is important—students sense how much we care about them and if we really have their best interests at heart. I could readily, even as a fourth grader, sense that my teacher who came to see my treehouse, was more interested in me as a person and what I was doing, than in the material he was teaching in his classroom, as important as the material was. His interest in me helped formulate my philosophy as a teacher! Getting to know my students and really caring about them has been of upmost importance to me. Working with students on challenging engineering projects has helped facilitate this.

I have also learned that different students have different optimum learning styles. I did research with others on this topic and found it a fascinating subject. Optimally, in the disciplines of engineering, I seemed to learn best when I could be exposed in a helpful way to some theory behind something, and then have the opportunity to put that theory into practice with real hardware trying to make something work. I came to realize that others may learn best using other approaches.

I chose to spend ten years in industry after starting my teaching career, because I wanted to learn, first hand, what engineers really did in industry. My motivation was to become a better teacher in being able to help my students become great learners and engineers. I sensed that in academia sometimes, we were emphasizing the things in our teaching which may not have been the most important things for our students. Some of the things they were getting good at in theoretical topics were very important, but they often had little knowledge about how to apply these theories to real-life situations. I was eager to have my students hit the ground running as a result of what they had learned in academia and also gain in academia, a realistic perception of what engineering really was as a discipline.

During my first year at BYU, fresh from industry, a team was formulated made up of fellow faculty members Spencer Magleby, Carl Sorensen and myself, as mentioned previously, to study some of these issues. We sought feedback from our stakeholders, particularly those who hired our students, concerning how they felt academia was doing in preparing students for graduate school and eventually engineering practice. We realized that their feedback might be skewed compared to academia’s perceptions, but we wanted to hear what they had to say and learn why they said it.

We simply applied the product design process to engineering education. We began by identifying the stakeholders in engineering education. We observed that we had many stakeholders, including students, university administrations, faculty, accreditation agencies, parents of students and or course, those hiring our students, among others.

We began by asking simple questions of these stakeholders, questions like: “What do you not like about new engineering graduates?” We found that many were eager to tell us!

We developed a paradigm of thinking of those who hired our graduates, or graduates from any school for that matter, as important stakeholders that may have been neglected to some extent in the past. This paradigm was helpful in applying the design process to what some might call our product—i.e. our students.

We used this feedback to devise a new two-semester Senior Capstone course at BYU, entitled, Integrated Product and Process Design. Our intent was to help reduce the weaknesses our stakeholders saw, not just in our students, but engineering students from throughout the country.

We published our results fairly widely and held a conference on the topic. The following list of weaknesses, as an example of some of the feedback from stakeholders, was first published in 1993 in our first journal article of the Journal of The American Society of Engineering Education. A number of related papers followed.

Industrial Perceptions of Weaknesses in New Engineering Graduates:

Technical arrogance
Little understanding of manufacturing processes
A desire for complicated and ‘high-tech’ solutions
Lack of design capability or creativity
Lack of appreciation for considering alternatives
No knowledge of ‘value engineering’
Lack of appreciation for variation
All want to be analysts
Poor perception of the overall project engineering process
Narrow view of engineering and related disciplines
Not wanting to get their hands dirty
Considering manufacturing work as boring
No understanding of the quality process
Weak communication skills
Little skill or experience working in teams
Being taught to work as individuals

During my 23 years at BYU we published many papers on our findings and what we had done to develop our Capstone course. We also published a number of articles on how we improved the course through the years. The course won a number of awards and the feedback we received from our stakeholders continued to drive us to more improvement. I might share a few lines here about the structure of BYU’s Capstone course that may be of interest.

Because we were interested in getting academia and industry working more closely together, we devised an approach of having each of our student project design teams be coached by either a faculty member from BYU or from industry. This approach was attractive to engineers from industry as well as our own full-time faculty and enabled our faculty and practicing engineers to rub shoulders together on a frequent basis as they dealt with real-life design and build projects sponsored by companies, for our students. The commitment of time for each faculty coach was typically about 3-5 hours a week. We paid our adjunct coaches from industry a salary and coaching became a part of the regular teaching load for full-time faculty.

Companies would contribute an educational grant of about $20,000 to BYU for each project. This money was used for coach salaries, hardware for the project and some nominal administrative costs. It also indirectly provided some funds to make coaching for full-time faculty part of their normal teaching load. We instituted a policy that any intellectual property that might be developed as a result of the project would be owned by the sponsoring company. This paradigm might seem a bit counterintuitive, but it incentivized the sponsoring companies to provide projects that were meaningful to the company and realistic design and build projects for our students to learn from. This approach also fostered companies, that got to know us better, to initiate additional research projects with the university. Intellectual property for research projects sponsored by companies was owned by the university.

We taught the students a structured design process and all faculty coaches attended the lectures on these topics one hour a week sitting with their student teams in a large classroom setting. We also had “lab sessions” where a number of student teams would meet as a smaller sized class and learn more about how to put this structured design process into practice with their teams and their coach.

Engineering design has some interesting characteristics when compared with engineering science. In engineering design our effort is to try and understand a situation well enough so that we can bring to bear the many resources and tools of engineering to create a solution that would be better than the current situation. The intent is to create something that will make the situation better. Engineering science provides important knowledge helping us understand the cause and effect relationships that exist between relevant parameters of things related to the problem. Engineering science helps us to be able to model and predict the outcome of possible design decisions.

But in engineering design, we use these tools, and many others, to work—usually with others, in teams—toward synthesizing a solution to achieve a desired outcome. In industry I found a marvelous tool being used that I had not been exposed to much in academia, the functional specification. Well written functional specifications created at the beginning of a project help define, in measurable terms, the desired outcomes of a given project. Functional specifications help practicing engineers begin their engineering work with a more well-defined outcome in mind. Engineering education is now using more of this paradigm in what it does to educate students.

Often as faculty we tend to teach what we are doing research work in. These topics often are the ones we are most interested in, and usually where we are most heavily evaluated. Right or wrong, I have observed that it is often easier to evaluate the quality and quantity of research, than it is to accurately evaluate student learning and the relevancy of what our students have learned, to what our students will need to do to be successful as practicing engineers.

About 6 or 7 years after we started and were improving our Capstone course I heard a remarkable address given in 1997 by my former mentor at Stanford, whom I spoke of previously, Dr. Henry B. Eyring. It was an address to all of the students and faculty at BYU entitled, A Child of God.

He spoke of how and why students might want to become great learners. His address resonated with me and I realized I had been trying to incorporate the attributes that great learners had that he spoke of in myself all my life. I realized that I had also been trying to incorporate these attributes into my own philosophy of education and help my students want to become great learners! In his address he spoke of five attributes of great learners.

Great learners:

Welcome correction
Make and keep commitments
Work hard
Help others learn
Expect opposition and work to overcome it

All of us have known great learners who demonstrated some of these attributes in their lives, but he challenged students to seek to incorporate all of these attributes into their lives. Since that time, I have found myself adding another attribute that I have also observed in great learners. I have also found myself encouraging my students and expressing faith in them, that they could also add this additional one to their list. Noted below is the additional attribute I added: Great learners thoughtfully formulate and ask good questions. All of these attributes are important for great engineers.

My paradigm has been to try to be an example of a great learner for my students—and with my students. I love to learn, and I love to learn with students! As I look back, I have loved to learn since I was a little boy. I have also come to believe that one of the main purposes of our lives is to learn. And yet, at least for me, learning has often been one of the most challenging things I do, and yet I have also found it to be one of the most rewarding!

Something that has been very rewarding also for me in my career as an engineering professor, teacher and researcher, has been to see a number of my past students pursue teaching as a career and seeking some good industrial experience in industry as part of that career path.

Entrusted with wonderful students, eager to be good learners, has certainly been one of the greatest joys of my life, and I have always enjoyed and delighted in being with students!

ASEE Activities

I joined The American Society for Engineering Education in 1970, actually before I began my teaching career. I knew I wanted to be a teacher and I found myself always interested in reading more about what others were doing to become better teachers of engineering education but also education in general. I had greatly admired many of the great teachers I learned from through the years and I wanted to be more like them.

As I began my teaching career and afterwards, through the years, I attended scores of conferences and always came away energized to try new things I learned from others to improve my teaching.

At times I would volunteer to conduct sessions at the regional or national ASEE conferences and of course, presented a number of papers. I never served as an officer in ASEE, but I supported the officers who did and volunteered when I could. I suppose the biggest contribution to ASEE I have been able to make was in the papers I helped to write, present and publish for others to learn some of the things we had learned.

Other Professional Activities

One of the things that I found important in my contribution to engineering education was in serving as a program evaluator for ABET. I also served as a member of the ABET Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) from 2000-2004. I found the accreditation process to be an important means in helping to improve engineering education. This also fostered an opportunity for me to learn more about what other schools were doing to make improvements.

I invested in this process with lots of my time and effort. I was especially excited when attributes of good practicing engineers and engineering students were identified for programs through a process much like we had used to develop our Capstone course at BYU, using feedback from stakeholders in industry, government and academia.

In addition, the accreditation process began to include seeking better ways to measure outcomes students achieved while in school, and then what outcomes they were practicing, once out in industry or in other settings. This sounds easy, and I suppose it is in principle, but in practice it is challenging, yet a very important step in improving engineering education. I was especially excited to see Capstone courses be added as a requirement for accredited engineering programs.

I became active in the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, presenting papers at their conferences and serving on a number of national steering committees and in other capacities. I also became an active member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and presented a number of papers at their meetings on technical subjects as well as the educational aspects of engineering education. I have also consulted on a number of product liability and intellectual property cases. I am currently a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a life member of ASEE and a life member of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.

After I retired from my service on the ABET Engineering Accreditation Commission, but while I was still teaching, I was asked to consult with several schools helping these schools prepare their programs to become accredited by ABET. This too was a rewarding set of experiences.

I look back on my many, many years of experience. I feel overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude that I have had so many remarkable opportunities to learn and to serve. I know I have been greatly blessed in being able to work with excellent students who have been eager to learn, and marvelous colleagues from academia and industry. I am grateful I have been given these opportunities to strive to be an influence for good in the discipline of engineering education.

I also feel a need to say in conclusion, that as important as all of these professional opportunities have been to me throughout my life, I have to express that I believe my greatest contribution and sense of fulfillment has come working with my sweetheart in rearing our precious family of eight remarkable children and at present, 24 grandchildren. And yes, our posterity continues to grow!

Within just a few months two more little grandchildren will arrive, eager to learn and to be taught to understand and serve in this marvelous world.

Robert H. Todd, PhD, P.E.

Fellow of The American Society of Engineering Education

Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Brigham Young University

Provo, Utah 84604

todd@byu.edu