Two Alumni Win Highest College Award

6/26/2012 By Kathryn L. Heine

Two MechSE alumni, Drs. Edward Caulfield and Donald Gall, have been chosen to receive the University of Illinois College of Engineering's highest honor for alumni in 2009: the Alumni Honor Award for Distinguished Service in Engineering. The award, which will be presented to the two alumni during a special convocation in May, recognizes outstanding leadership in the planning and direction of engineering or contributions to knowledge in the field of engineering.

Written by By Kathryn L. Heine

Two MechSE alumni, Drs. Edward Caulfield and Donald Gall, have been chosen to receive the University of Illinois College of Engineering's highest honor for alumni in 2009: the Alumni Honor Award for Distinguished Service in Engineering. The award, which will be presented to the two alumni during a special convocation in May, recognizes outstanding leadership in the planning and direction of engineering or contributions to knowledge in the field of engineering.

Dr. Caulfield is President and Chief Technical Officer of Packer Engineering, a multidisciplinary engineering consulting and technical services company that provides clients with a wide range of services, including accident investigation and reconstruction, product liability investigations, failure analysis and product design evaluations and testing. During his 30-year career with Packer Engineering, Caulfield has investigated a wide array of accidents ranging from the Hyatt walkway collapse in Kansas City to the American DC-10 crash at O'Hare International Airport. Since he was appointed president in 1995, the company's annual revenues have almost tripled, and its employees nearly doubled. At the same time that he was growing the business, he made service to society a priority. In addition to his own contributions as an in-demand expert witness, he has hired students from Illinois' College of Engineering for both internships and permanent positions, while dedicating many personal hours and dollars in support of programs in theoretical and applied mechanics. Caulfield graduated from the University of Illinois with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (1972), and both M.S. (1974) and Ph.D. (1979) degrees in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. Prior to joining Packer Engineering in 1979, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois, where he taught courses in dynamics, vibration, material science and design of machinery.

Dr. Gall is the founding President and Chief Executive Officer of Phoenix-based Omega Legal Systems, a leading provider of financial and practice management systems for mid-sized to large law firms. The company has been an industry pioneer, being the first to provide "no required period end" closings, the ability to track fee income by working attorneys, innovative billing strategies such as e-billing, integrated Client Relationship Management (CRM), the use of client-server technology, object-oriented programming techniques, and integrated business intelligence. He launched Omega after 10 successful years in academia, from an assistant professorship at Carnegie Mellon University to a research professorship at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He holds a U.S. patent on an invention related to fuel injection systems, and was honored in 1969 by the International Conference on Research in Production (CIRP) for his work on the optimal control of manufacturing processes, becoming the first U.S. citizen to receive CIRP's F. W. Taylor Medal. Gall has served on the Board of Directors of the Scottsdale, Arizona Boys and Girls Club and is a member of the Verde Vaqueros, which uses its ranch facility to raise funds for the Boys and Girls Club. A senior member of MechSE's Alumni Board, he received a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois in 1956, and later earned three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: S.M. (1958), M.E. (1960) and Sc.D. (1964).


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This story was published June 26, 2012.