UB Professor Tarunraj Singh Is Named a Fellow of ASME

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Tarunraj Singh, PhD, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University at Buffalo, has been named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Fellowship, which is the highest elected grade of membership in ASME, is conferred upon members with at least 10 years of active engineering practice who have made significant contributions to the profession.

ASME awarded the fellowship to Singh for his contributions in the area of control and estimation: control is the branch of engineering concerned with generating precisely the right inputs to generate a desired output, while estimation allows engineers to model how systems will behave in the future and to quantify the uncertainty associated with that model. ASME is a professional organization promoting the art, science and practice of mechanical and multidisciplinary engineering and allied sciences.

Singh is the author of "Optimal Reference Shaping for Dynamical Systems: Theory and Applications" and has published more than 175 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers.

He received the Teetor Award for engineering education from the Society of Automotive Engineers, as well as the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship; he also received a NASA summer faculty fellowship and a fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Singh has frequently been invited by universities and research laboratories to participate in their research seminars. He also was twice awarded the Riefler Award, which honors outstanding junior faculty in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The purpose of Singh's research ranges from better forecasting of natural and manmade disasters to enhancing the precision of robotic systems.

In the field of control, Singh has been funded by Honda to develop control systems that provide cues to drivers to reduce the potential for spinouts on slick roads. Other precision control projects Singh has studied range from spacecraft controls that may be applied to space structures as large as a football field, to tiny hard disk drives, which serve as data repositories on iPods.

In the field of estimation, Singh works with other UB scientists and engineers in the UB 2020 Strategic Strength in Extreme Events: Mitigation and Response to provide more accurate forecasts for volcanic ash plumes like the one generated by last spring's eruption of Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland and the one currently occurring in Indonesia.

Singh's expertise also could help provide more accurate forecasting to help predict where oil-slick plumes will go, such as the one that resulted from the Deepwater Horizon spill, in order to more precisely guide the placement of booms and the deployment of skimmers and chemical dispersants.

He received his education at Bangalore University, the Indian Institute of Science and the University of Waterloo in Ontario, where he received a PhD in mechanical engineering in 1991. He is a resident of East Amherst, N.Y.