May 30, 2003

SMU Engineering Professor Elected Fellow Of The American Society Of Mechanical Engineers

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DALLAS (SMU) -- José Lage, professor and associate chair of SMU's Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been elected a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Only 2.7 percent of the nearly 118,000 mechanical engineers in the nation are fellows of the society. Fellows are elected by the ASME Board of Directors, and selection is based on the person's contributions to the field of mechanical engineering. Lage has published more than 110 technical papers, six book chapters and is the author of the book, Heat Transfer in Microscale and Porous Media, to be published in 2003. He also established the Laboratory for Porous Materials Applications at SMU.

SMU's Department of Mechanical Engineering has only one other ASME Fellow, engineering professor Jack Holman.

"The society limits the number of engineers elected to fellowships each year," Holman said. "Sometimes a fellow is elected without knowing that they have been nominated, which is indeed a great honor."

Lage has been a member of the SMU faculty since 1991 and held the J. Lindsay Embrey Trustee Professorship for junior faculty in Mechanical Engineering from 1993 to 1997 . His research spans the areas of bioengineering, electronics (cooling and fabrication), energy systems and the environment. He has pioneered the use of microporous media for cooling airborne military radar avionics (for which he received a patent), established the use of porous medium analysis for studying gas diffusion in the alveolar region of the human lungs and broke new ground by being the first to apply fractional calculus to experimental heat transfer of thin films.

Lage has previously received several awards, including the SMU Golden Mustang Award, the ASEE Outstanding Teaching Award, the Sigma Xi Outstanding Research Award and the ASME North Texas Section Engineer of the Year Award.

Lage holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, with emphasis in thermal sciences, from Duke University.

In addition to Lage and Holman, the School of Engineering has fellows in other prestigious engineering societies: SMU Engineering Dean Stephen A. Szygenda and Engineering Professors Jerome Butler and Gary Evans are fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE); Bijan Mohraz, chair of the Department of Environmental and Civil Engineering, is a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers.