After graduating from the University of Notre Dame with my bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, I entered the workforce as an engineer for A. B. Dick Company, a company near Chicago that manufactured small offset printing presses. After working for a couple of years at A. B. Dick, I left to go to Mid-West Automation Systems, Inc., which was purchased by D. T. Industries during my time there. At Mid-West, I designed automated assembly equipment - machines that went into our customers' factories and assembled components into finished products. After leaving Mid-West, I went to work for Western Printing Machinery Company (WPM), where I worked on large equipment for the printing industry - die cutters, delivery tables, angle bar decks, and other equipment you would find in a large paper processing plant.
During the same time that I worked for WPM, I completed my master's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago; I also taught part-time at Oakton Community College, in the Mathematics and Technology division (not at the same time, though!). I left both the positions at Oakton and at WPM to return to school for a doctoral degree. In 2010, I received my Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan. After completing my Ph.D., I was a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Michigan, taught part-time at Eastern Michigan University, and then went to work at LMS International, now part of Siemens PLM.
In 2013, I accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. I teach primarily in the area of dynamic systems and controls, and my research focuses on mechatronics and control systems. For more information about my current work, see the links to the left. If any students would like to see what advice I'd give on scholarships, office hours, getting good grades, or going to graduate school, click here.
Research Description
I have several areas of research, both strictly technical and in the area of engineering education.
Technical Research
One of my current projects involves autonomous vehicles. Currently in its early stages, this project features autonomous 1:18 scale cars. A commercially available RC car has been modified, to work off of the National Instruments myRIO controller, and sensors have been added to the car. Once testing is complete, several more will be produced, and then I plan to build a reconfigurable cityscape, with city streets, traffic signs, and a few buildings (to provide a realistic situation, where sensors have to work in a cluttered environment).
Once the environment is constructed, I plan to test algorithms for autonomous vehicles, with particular attention to how vehicles interact.
For videos of the car detecting and going around an obstacle, click here , here , or here .
Engineering Education Research
My primary interest in engineering education research is in the experiences of returning graduate students - those graduate students who, rather than going directly from their undergraduate education straight to graduate school, spend significant amounts of time working in their field prior to graduate study. I launched a small preliminary study in 2010, with a collaborator at the University of Michigan, and the work has continued and is still ongoing. Publications on this topic and others are available on my Publications page.