Engineering Design Educator Dym Receives Lamme Award

Clive L. Dym, professor emeritus of engineering, will receive the 2015 Benjamin Garver Lamme Award from the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), at a ceremony to be held June 15 during the ASEE Annual Conference and Exhibition in Seattle, Washington. Dym is being recognized for his many contributions to engineering design education.

Dym, a co-winner of The National Academy of Engineering’s 2012 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, created the Harvey Mudd College engineering program’s formal design instruction and contributed to a hands-on studio component for the first-year projects class. Dym also advocated the integration of the design and making of tools and prototypes into that class. This helped students learn about manufacturing and design and how to communicate about their work. Dym is the driving force behind the Mudd Design Workshops, which bring together a wide range of institutions to discuss engineering education and their shared experiences. Before retiring from Harvey Mudd in 2012, Dym was the Fletcher Jones Professor of Engineering Design (1991­–2012) and director of the Center for Design Education at Harvey Mudd (1995–2012). With faculty colleagues M. Mack Gilkeson and J. Richard Phillips, Dym received the Gordon Prize “For creating and disseminating innovations in undergraduate engineering design education to develop engineering leaders.”

“I am honored to be selected for the ASEE’s 2015 Benjamin Garver Lamme Award,” said Dym. “I was struck by the list of prior honorees: I never would have guessed that my name would be in the company of such illustrious figures as Stephen P. Timoshenko (1939), Vannevar Bush (1955) and Theodore Von Karman (1960). It’s also flattering that I had the good fortune to know and work with many of the recipients since. So, to be chosen for this award is simply breathtaking.”

The Benjamin Garver Lamme Award is bestowed upon a distinguished engineering educator for contributions to the art of teaching, contributions to research and technical literature and achievements that contribute to the advancement of the profession of engineering college administration. Representing the best in engineering education administration, Lamme Award recipients demonstrate the following qualities:

• Excellence in teaching and ability to inspire students to high levels of accomplishment.
• Improvement of engineering education through contributions of research, books or technical articles that have a lasting influence on engineering education.
• Administration of engineering schools that has led to definite and recognized improvements in the art of engineering education.
• Participation in the work of engineering and educational societies that has led to the improvement of engineering education.
• Achievements outside the field of teaching, such as personal professional development in industry, consulting work and inventions.

Dym will receive the honor during the ASEE award ceremony, one of the high points of the Society’s 122nd Annual Conference and Exposition, which will be held June 14–17, 2015, at the Washington State Convention Center.