Virginia Tech

Andrew Kurdila earned his B.S. in Engineering Mechanics at the University of Cincinnati in 1983, and his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1989. He has been at Virginia Tech since 2005; prior to that, he was at the University of Florida, where he was the Interim Director of Graduate Engineering & Research Center. Honors and fellowships include the NASA Certificate of Recognition (twice), the Raymond L. Bisplinghoff Award, and the Luther Long Memorial Award. He has written several books, including Systems and Control, Foundations and Applications, with M. Zabarankin, and Foundations of Structural Dynamics, 2nd Edition, with R. Craig.

Mark Pierson earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Virginia Tech in 2000 and 2005 respectively. Prior to that he spent over 23 years as a naval submarine officer. Assignments included Electrical Officer, Reactor Officer, Chief Engineer and Executive Officer on nuclear submarines and Radiological Controls Officer on a submarine repair ship. He also served as a staff engineer at the Naval Reactors Headquarters. In his last assignment, he was the Deputy Department Head for Materials, Engineering and Physical Sciences at the Office of Naval Research. He retired from the U.S. Navy in 2001. Since that time, he has been at Virginia Tech both as a student and as a faculty member. Currently, he is a research associate professor in the Mechanical Engineering department. His mathematical research involves partial differential equations and abstract evolution equations with an emphasis on differential-algebraic equations and functional analysis. Within mechanical engineering, he has also conducted applied research in robotics and nuclear engineering.

Michael J. Roan (M'03) received the B.S. degree in physics (1989), M.S. degree in acoustics (1993), and Ph.D. degree in acoustics (1999) from The Pennsylvania State University. He has worked in industry for a range of companies in the areas of active noise control (Noise Cancellation Technologies, Inc.) and signal processing for Westinghouse ESG and Alliant Tech. While working on the SQQ-89 ASW combat system, he implemented new classification algorithms for the SQS-53C, and worked in the SQQ-89 systems integration area. Currently, he is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech. Previously, he was the head of the Signal Processing Department at the Applied Research Laboratory and on the graduate faculty in Acoustics at Penn State. During the fall of 2004, he held the position of Visiting Fellow at Princeton University where he worked in the areas of multi-modal information integration and sensor networks.

He has published numerous technical papers and proceedings articles and is the author of one book chapter on features and inverse detection methods for failures in materials. His primary research interests are in the area of statistical signal processing, detection and estimation theory, and information fusion. He has also worked in the areas of data authentication, non-linear processing for condition based maintenance and adaptive filtering.

Awards received: ONR Young Investigator award, for collaborative signal processing systems and Bayesian/belief networks (2004)