Two University of Texas at Austin College of Engineering faculty members will be honored as outstanding educators at an awards banquet on October 10.
Dr. Mark Mear, associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics, will receive the Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company Excellence in Engineering Teaching Award. Dr. Christine Schmidt, assistant professor of chemical engineering, will receive the Outstanding Teaching by an Assistant Professor in Engineering Award.
Dr. Mear received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from UT Austin. He earned a master's degree in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. and two degrees from Harvard: a master's in applied mathematics and a PhD. in engineering science.
His research includes both theoretical and applied approaches to solid mechanics, with specialization in micromechanics, fracture mechanics and boundary element methods. A project to develop computational techniques for fracture analysis is currently being sponsored by the NASA Airframe Structural Integrity Program.
His passion for research is equaled by a deep commitment to engineering students. He teaches a highly popular course in Mechanics of Solids and serves both as the aerospace engineering undergraduate advisor and as an assistant graduate advisor to the engineering mechanics program.
Dr. Mear’s previous honors include the College of Engineering’s Outstanding Teaching by an Assistant Professor Award and two awards from NASA for his structural integrity work. A faculty member since 1987, he holds the Engineering Foundation Centennial Teaching Fellowship.
Dr. Schmidt, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, received her bachelor’s degree from UT Austin and her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
A pioneer in the new and rapidly growing field of cell engineering, Dr. Schmidt studies “biomaterials” – unique blends of biological and inorganic substances which, when implanted into a living organism, promote growth or regeneration in the surrounding natural tissues. She and her graduate students recently developed a biomaterial, consisting of an electrically conducting plastic dotted with sugar molecule clusters, which specifically targets blood vessel growth and has potential applications in the fields of neurosurgery and reconstructive surgery.
Her innovative class in Cell and Tissue Engineering, which she designed to give students an opportunity to experience the real life work environment of diverse project teams, accommodates both undergraduates and graduate students. She also teaches the undergraduate chemical engineering core course Unit Operations 1, for which she created a highly interactive lecture format that has been adopted as the departmental norm.
Prior to joining the faculty in 1996, Dr. Schmidt held a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral research fellowship at M.I.T., where her biomedical engineering research garnered coverage in such international publications as The Economist and the New York Times. She is the first holder of the Laurence E. McMakin, Jr. Assistant Professorship of Chemical Engineering.
A high-resolution photo of Drs. Schmidt and Mear is located at: http://www.engr.utexas.edu/news/high_resolution/smhighres.cfm
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