Debasish Dutta
Debasish (Deba) Dutta is Dean of the Graduate College and Associate Provost at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and a Scholar-in-Residence at the National Academy of Engineering. During 2004-07 he served at the National Science Foundation as Acting Director of the Division of Graduate Education, Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) Program Director and as Advisor in the Office of Assistant Director, Education and Human Resources. He chaired the Learning and Workforce Development subcommittee during the development of NSF’s Cyberinfrastructure Strategy (Vision for 21st Century Discovery).
At Illinois, Deba is Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering. Prior to this he was on the faculty of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A Fellow of AAAS and ASME, Deba Dutta has received several awards including the ASME Design Automation award and the NSF Director’s Award for Collaborative Excellence. He is a member of ASEE and SME.
Lalit Patil
Lalit Patil is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Mechanical Science and Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and manages research at the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Lab. Prior to this he was a senior research fellow and lecturer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
James B. Porter, Jr.
James B. Porter, Jr. was chief engineer and vice president of Engineering and Operations for DuPont until his retirement in September 2008. Jim joined the company in 1966 as a chemical engineer in the engineering service division (ESD) field program at the Engineering Test Center in Newark, Delaware. He left the same year for a tour in the United States Army and returned in April 1968 as a technical services engineer at DuPont’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, fibers plant. He was named vice president of Engineering on November 1, 1996, and became vice president of Safety, Health & Environment and Engineering on February 1, 2004. He assumed the position of Chief Engineer and Vice President of DuPont Engineering and Operations on July 1, 2006.
Jim has served as chair for the Construction Industry Institute (CII) and he was the 2004 recipient of CII’s Carroll H. Dunn Award of Excellence. In 2005 he
received the Engineering and Construction Contracting Association Achievement Award and in 2007 he was honored with the Society of Women Engineers Rodney D. Chipp Memorial Award. In 2008 he was the inaugural recipient of FIATECH’s “James B. Porter, Jr. Award for Technology Leadership.” He is a member of several boards of directors and is on the Argonne National Laboratory Board of Governors.
Jim is the founder and President of Sustainable Operations Solutions, LLC, which provides consulting services to help companies make significant and sustainable improvements in workplace safety, process safety management, capital effectiveness, and operations productivity.
Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he received a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from the University of Tennessee in 1965.
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