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The Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Center receives this year's American Helicopter Society's Grover E. Bell Award

The Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Center receives this year's American Helicopter Society's Grover E. Bell Award for its pioneering fundamental contributions in smart structures technologies that had a successful transition into helicopter systems.

This award recognizes the successful completion of two major smart structures programs:

• URI (1991-96) with team members from the Clark School of Engineering's Aerospace, Mechanical, Materials, Electrical Departments and UMBC (Mechanical)

• MURI (1996-2002) with team members from the Clark School of Engineering's Aerospace and Mechanical departments, Penn State and Cornell.

Both of these programs were sponsored by the Army Research Office and spurred an enormous growth of smart structures activities on the University of Maryland campus.

Faculty members who have contributed to the Gessow Rotorcraft Center include: Profs. E. Atkins, J. Baeder, B. Balachandran, A. Baz, R. Celi, A. Gessow, I. Chopra, A. Dasgupta, P.S. Krishnaprasad, J. Leishman, D. Pines, L.G. Salamanca-Riba, R. Sanner, F. Schmitz, J. Sirkis, A. Vizzini, N. Wereley and M. Wuttig.

The American Helicopter Society gives this award "to foster and encourage research and experimentation in helicopter development to the person or persons making an outstanding contribution to the field."

The award consists of a gold medal, a certificate, and an honorarium, and will be presented at the Annual Forum of the American Helicopter Society, June 12, 2002 at the Palais des Congres, Montreal, Canada.

June 1, 2002