Sedwick Receives 2016 A. James Clark School Engineering Faculty Service Award

Department of Aerospace Engineering Associate Professor Raymond Sedwick has been selected to receive the 2016 A. James Clark School Engineering Faculty Service Award. This award recognizes a faculty member whose service to his or her department, to the Clark School, and to the university has been judged outstanding.

Ray Sedwick is a recognized expert in space propulsion, the director of the Space Power and Propulsion Laboratory, a recipient of the National Science Foundation's CAREER award, and a Keystone Professor. He developed two new courses in plasma physics for aerospace applications, and he is a regular instructor of the Keystone course in thermodynamics.

He recently founded the Center for Orbital Debris Education and Research and has hosted two national orbital debris conferences at the University of Maryland (UMD). He has served for five years as the faculty advisor for the UMD student chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and he has won six student-sponsored awards variously for “best mentor,” “best professor,” and the UMD AIAA student chapter's prestigious Broken Propeller Award for “teaching a difficult subject exceptionally well.”

He is a regular mentor to other faculty, and he has participated in not just research projects but also sponsored educational projects. He has served on university service committees and numerous national technical committees in the aerospace industry.

Students under his guidance have won awards such as NSF graduate research fellowships, the NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship, the International Amelia Earhart Research Fellowship, the Harriet Jenkins Graduate Fellowship, and the Alfred P. Sloane Fellowship.

Sedwick has been a faculty member at Maryland since fall 2007. He received his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Penn State University in 1992, and both his M.S. and Ph.D. from the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1994 and 1997.

Published December 5, 2016