Campus Recognizes Lambros for Graduate and Professional Teaching

4/6/2015 Susan Mumm, Media Specialist

Prof. John Lambros' course creation and direction of AE's online master's degree earns campus accolades.

Written by Susan Mumm, Media Specialist

Prof. John Lambros
Prof. John Lambros
Prof. John Lambros
Aerospace Engineering at Illinois Prof. John Lambros has been selected for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Campus Excellence in Graduate and Professional Teaching Award.

Lambros, a 15-year veteran of the AE Department, has been responsible for introducing innovative graduate level courses on topics including fracture mechanics and dynamic response of materials. Over the years these courses have been attended by graduate students in civil engineering, materials science, and mechanical engineering, as well as aerospace engineering.

In his role as AE Associate Head for Graduate Programs, Lambros also has led in creating an online master’s degree program in aerospace engineering that emphasizes the same quality curriculum that students experience on campus. The effort has significantly expanded the reach of AE’s graduate teaching.

Lambros believes in hands-on learning for engineering students. “Problem solving is as important as theoretical fundamentals,” according to his teaching philosophy. “For this reason a significant part of my classroom teaching also involves problem solving techniques and procedures, as well as hands-on experiences.”

This is apparent in AE 522, Dynamic Properties of Materials, a course Lambros created based on a course he experienced as a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology. Lambros added a hands-on component in which the students perform a set of carefully crafted experiments using some of the advanced experimental tools available in his own lab, the High Strain Rate Mechanics Laboratory.

In AE 560, Fracture Mechanics Laboratory, another course Lambros created, students apply state-of-the-art experimental techniques to fracture problems. They work in small teams to perform a set of experiments, and submit reports in the form of research manuscripts formatted according to solid mechanics journals. Lambros then reviews these “research manuscripts,” thereby providing a dual assessment of the experimental work itself and of the technical writing.

In establishing AE’s online master’s degree, Lambros focused on the curriculum being fully equal to the on-campus degree in every aspect: The admission process is identical, and courses are taught by the same instructors during the same semesters as the campus offerings, with the same homework assignments, midterm and final exams. Lambros has emphasized advising online students, particularly in regards to course selection.

Lambros earned a bachelor’s of engineering in aeronautical engineering from the Imperial College of Science and Technology at the University of London in 1988; and a master’s and PhD degrees from Caltech in 1989 and 1994, respectively. He joined Illinois in 2000 as an associate professor after spending 5 years at the University of Delaware, Mechanical Engineering Department. He became a full professor in 2007, and AE Associate Head for Graduate Programs in 2011.

His honors include a 1999 National Science Foundation CAREER Award; a 2007 Xerox Award for Excellence in Research from the College of Engineering at Illinois; election in 2010 as a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and in 2014 as a Fellow of the Society for Experimental Mechanics (SEM); and the 2015 SEM M.M. Frocht Award for Excellence in Mechanics Teaching.
 


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This story was published April 6, 2015.