Lewis Named Director of UB Visualization Center

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Kemper E. Lewis, Ph.D., professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University at Buffalo, has been named executive director of UB's New York State Center for Engineering Design and Industrial Innovation (NYSCEDII).

Established in 2001 through the support of New York State Assembly sponsors Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Assemblyman Robin Schimminger and Assemblyman Paul Tokasz and other Western New York legislators, NYSCEDII is New York State's only engineering design research center in the state that utilizes virtual reality (VR) and scientific visualization. It is among the nation's top few centers of engineering design and industrial innovation.

Lewis previously served as interim director of NYSCEDII and before that, he was director of education and training.

A member of the faculty of the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences since 1996, Lewis is director of the Design of Open Engineering Systems (DOES) Research Lab in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, which promotes and advances the state-of-the-art in multidisciplinary design optimization and modern design theory.

He currently has more than $4 million in research grants from sources including the National Science Foundation, NASA Langley Research Center, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the State of New York, Rolls Royce-Allison Engine Company, Praxair Corp. and UB.

Lewis and his colleagues in the lab develop tools to study various process and product tradeoffs in the design of complex systems, which involve multiple designers and/or design teams with different and conflicting objectives and preferences.

He has been awarded the State University of New York Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Sloan Foundation New Faculty Fellowship, the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award from the Society for Automotive Engineering and UB's Milton Plesur Award for Excellence in Teaching.

He also was the recipient of a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development grant to apply game theory -- the same theory that military strategists use -- to improve systems design processes.

Lewis earned two bachelor's degrees from Duke University, a master's and doctoral degrees from Georgia Institute of Technology and a master's in business administration from UB.

He lives in East Amherst.