Engineering
Accolades
Robert C. Marlay B.S.E. '69, Lewis C. Brewster
B.S.E. '86, and former dean Earl H. Dowell were honored by the Pratt
School of Engineering Alumni Association at its annual awards banquet
in April. Marlay received the Distinguished Alumni Award, Brewster
the Distinguished Young Alumni Award, and Dowell the Distinguished
Service Award.Marlay is director of the Office of Science and Technology
Policy in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Policy. He is
an adviser to the Secretary and, as executive secretariat to the department's
R&D Council, he leads agency-wide groups charged with developing
policies on research and development management, portfolio analysis,
intellectual property, use of peer review, foreign-company participation
in national laboratory research,and technology transfer.
An NROTC graduate, he served in the Navy's Civil
Engineering Corps before earning two master's degrees and a Ph.D.
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He serves in the Naval
Reserve as an admiral, where he is the senior combat engineering and
construction officer overseeing the Navy's 13,000 reserve Seabees.
His military decorations number more than a dozen.
Marlay was appointed to President Carter's task
force on energy policy,which resulted in the passage of the Energy
Production and Conservation Act that established the Department
of Energy in 1977. He had worked at its predecessor agencies since
1974. He received the department's Meritorious Service Award for
his two-year work in developing a national energy strategy that
became the basis for the Energy Policy Act of 1992. This year, the
department presented him with two additional awards for his leadership
in technology issues.
Distinguished Young Alumni Award recipient Brewster
joined Rockwell as a systems engineer in 1986 in its Dallas-based
Network Transmission Systems division. He helped upgrade the backbone
microwave telecommunications system for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
He was also instrumental in
engineering the fiber-optic transmission system that carried broadcast
video and data traffic throughout metropolitan Seoul during the
1988 Summer Olympics.
He took a leave of absence to pursue his M.B.A.
at Stanford University and rejoined Rockwell upon graduation in
1991 in its Semiconductor Systems division in Newport Beach, California.
In 1998, Rockwell spun off that business into a separately traded
public company, Conexant Systems Inc.,
and appointed Brewster senior vice president of worldwide sales.
Conexant is now the largest maker of semiconductiors focused exclusively
on communications.
Last year, Brewster was named by the Orange
County Business Journal as one of the county's top ten businesspeople
under forty. Dowell, dean emeritus of the Pratt School and J.A.
Jones Professor of mechanical engineering and material science,
earned his B.S.E. at the University of Illinois and his S.M. and
Sc.D. degrees from M.I.T. He was on the faculty at Princeton University
before coming to Duke in 1983. He was dean for sixteen years, the
longest tenure for a dean at both Duke and engineering.
Elected to the National Academy of Engineering
in 1993, Dowell has served as vice chair and chair of the American
Society for Engineering Education's Engineering Dean's Council,
and has chaired its public policy committee. He is a past president
of the American Academy of Mechanics-which has given him a Distinguished
Service Award-and past vice president and member of the board of
directors of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
(AIAA).
Dowell is a recipient of AIAA's Structural Dynamics,
Structures, and Materials Research Award; this year the AIAA named
him the Theodore Von Karman Lecturer. He has also been honored with
a Distinguished Alumnus Award by the University of Illinois.
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