Advanced manufacturing expert Daniel Walczyk, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Class of 1991and associate professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering, has been named a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

“We congratulate Dr. Walczyk on being elected a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is richly deserving of this honor and high recognition by his peers,” said David Rosowsky, dean of the School of Engineering at Rensselaer. “An educator, innovator, and engineer of the highest order, Dan’s research offers invaluable lessons to students as well as to industry on smarter, more efficient manufacturing. We are honored to count him among our growing list of society fellows in the School of Engineering.”

The ASME applauded Walczyk for his “significant contributions to the fields of rapid tooling, manufacturing processes, and biomedical device design.” As part of the honor, Walczyk will be recognized in June at the ASME annual conference in Dallas.

After working in industry for several years as a mechanical design engineer, primarily at General Electric, Walczyk joined the Rensselaer faculty in 1996. His research focuses on the development of rapid tooling and manufacturing processes, and ranges from reducing the time it takes to manufacture membrane electrode assemblies used in fuel cells, to forming and curing of thermoset composite parts. He recently was named an associate director of the Rensselaer Center for Automation Technologies and Systems (CATS).

Walczyk holds five U.S. patents, plus two pending patents, for his manufacturing innovations and inventions. He developed a profiled edge lamination tooling device to create large-scale molds and dies, as well as an out-of-autoclave curing method for advanced composites. Walczyk also invented the weight bearing indicator, which is a simple, inexpensive biomedical device that provides biofeedback to patients who are supposed to minimize or avoid overloading an injured leg or foot.

In 1998, the White House honored Walczyk with the highly prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for his creative advances in rapid tooling methods and development of undergraduate and graduate courses in design and manufacturing. The National Science Foundation (NSF) recognized Walczyk in 1996 with a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. Walczyk is also a past recipient of a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) fellowship and the 1998 Loctite Corp. Summer Engineering Faculty Fellowship.

Walczyk received his bachelor’s degree in 1986 from Syracuse University, and went on to earn his master’s degree in 1991 from Rensselaer and doctoral degree in 1996 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.