Professor Kevin W. Cassel Named ASME Fellow

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers elevates approximately 3 percent of its members to fellow status. This October, Kevin W. Cassel, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and professor of applied mathematics at Illinois Institute of Technology, was honored with that recognition.

“Being nominated as a society fellow by your peers at your home institution and elected by your peers in the broader mechanical engineering community is a double honor,” says Cassel, who is also an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “I am humbled by the recognition and will endeavor to live up to the expectations of the fellow designation.”

Cassel’s research spans a broad and multidisciplinary range of topics in the thermo-fluid sciences as well as in advanced analytical and computational methods. He is currently pursuing a novel approach to physically motivated, model-driven methods in which local features of complex and rapidly changing physical systems are captured using traditional analytical methods for use in modern reduced-physics models that are significantly less demanding to simulate numerically. It is anticipated that this approach may have broad applications to systems involving multiscale physics, multidisciplinary design optimization and control, and system-identification settings, for example.

Author of the book Variational Methods with Applications in Science and Engineering (Cambridge University Press 2013), Cassel has a book slated for publication in January 2021, also by Cambridge, Matrix, Numerical, and Optimization Methods in Science and Engineering.

Cassel is the recipient of numerous other honors including the Illinois Tech University Excellence in Teaching Award (2008), the Ralph L. Barnett Excellence in Teaching Award (2007, 2001), the 2002 Alfred Noble Prize, and the Army Research Office Young Investigator Award (1998–2001). He has been a visiting researcher at the University of Manchester and University College London, and is a visiting professor at the University of Palermo, Italy.

Sumanta Acharya, chair of the Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering, says that Cassel’s commitment and dedication are exceptional.

“Professor Cassel is extraordinarily committed to Illinois Tech and in furthering the growth of the mechanical and aerospace engineering programs. He is consistently evaluated to be one of the best instructors in the department, and spends significant amounts of time advising and mentoring students,” says Acharya. “He has clearly made significant contributions toward advancing the field of computational and analytical fluid mechanics, and ASME is recognizing him for these sustained technical contributions by bestowing the fellow status.”

Photo: Kevin W. Cassel, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and professor of applied mathematics