The First 50 Years of the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan: 1955–2005
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7. The Center for Ergonomics
7.1. The Foundation Years for the Center for Ergonomics (1960s and 1970s)
The origins of ergonomics, (which means “the study of work” in Greek) within the Department of Industrial Engineering began with the formation in 1961 of the Engineering Human Performance Laboratory lead by Walton Hancock. As was described earlier, this laboratory was supported by the Methods-Time Measurement (MTM) Association, a consortium of companies that supported and conducted empirical research on worker productivity and the factors affecting it. Hancock believed both field studies and controlled laboratory studies were necessary to understand and quantify human behavior in various work environments. In pursuing the development of a human performance laboratory, he was joined by research engineer James Foulke in 1960. Over the next 10 years, with the support of the MTM Association and, later, the Chrysler and Ford corporations, Hancock, Foulke, and several graduate students provided a large amount of field and laboratory data describing worker movement times and the conditions that affected operator learning rates, error rates, and decision processes.
Physical fatigue and heat stress issues were studied in this laboratory during the mid-1960s by Don Chaffin, who at the time was an industrial engineering PhD student. After receiving his PhD in 1967, Chaffin joined the faculty in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Kansas Medical Center. He returned to the University in 1969 as an assistant professor in the IE Department. During this same period, Richard Pew, whose primary faculty appointment was in the Department of Psychology and who had expertise in human-perception and display design, was provided a joint appointment in IE. In 1971, James Miller, an expert on safety systems from Ohio State University joined the department as an assistant professor, further expanding the lab’s scope to include safety engineering.
With the combined expertise of professors Hancock, Chaffin, Miller, and Pew, and with the successful operation of the Engineering Human Performance Laboratory, the first occupational safety engineering training grant was secured in 1972 with Chaffin as the project director. This grant from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health provided funding for six to eight graduate students annually who were studying in the industrial and operations engineering (IOE) subspecialty of ergonomics and safety engineering.
Also in1972, Chaffin became the director of the newly named Human Performance and Safety Engineering Laboratory, replacing Hancock, who had shifted his work to understanding and modeling hospital systems. A year later Gary Herrin joined the department from Ohio State University, adding expertise in statistical analysis and quality assurance methods. Herrin further provided technical support and leadership for a host of empirical studies of worker health and safety at various industrial sites around the country. In 1974, Gary Langolf, who earlier had received his PhD from the IOE Department, returned as an assistant professor after being on the faculty at Wayne State University for a couple years. His research concentrated on perceptual motor control related to precise movements. Langolf and Chaffin immediately started collaborations with Larry Fine, an occupational epidemiologist in the School of Public Health, and James Albers, a neurologist in the School of Medicine. Together they conducted fundamental studies that quantified how common neural toxic exposures in the workplace affected perception and movement control, with grant support from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
In 1977, Thomas Armstrong, who had received an interdisciplinary PhD in industrial engineering, occupational health, and physiology from the University of Michigan (UM), was appointed an assistant professor in the School of Public Health, with a joint appointment in the IOE Department. His research was primarily on understanding and preventing upper extremity cumulative trauma disorders in industry. Louis Boydstun joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1977 from Purdue University. He specialized in human-display interface designs. Lastly, in 1980, Devinder Kochhar, an expert in visual display designs, joined the faculty from the University of Waterloo, replacing Boydstun, who left in 1983 to join the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Thus, by the end of the ’70s the IOE Department had five full-time ergonomics faculty members (Chaffin, Miller, Herrin, Langolf, and Boydstun, with part-time support from Armstrong, Fine, and Albers).
The ’70s provided many opportunities for the faculty in the Human Performance and Safety Engineering Laboratory to find financial support for their research, as companies sought to improve the human aspects of work. During the ’70s there was a growing concern among business management groups and unions to reduce the cost and suffering caused by occupational overexertion injuries. With the advent of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration in 1970, combined with better computerized record-keeping systems, worker injuries began to be publically reported, along with the costs of treatment and lost work time. This open reporting revealed that more than $100 billion annually was being spent in the United States on occupationally related lower back disorders, carpal tunnel syndrome, and many other types of musculoskeletal disorders; in some companies more than a third of the workers had injuries that resulted in medically prescribed work restrictions.
This era also saw people continue to travel into space, which brought NASA funding for Chaffin to conduct several studies to predict the human strength capability of astronauts when they attempted to perform manual tasks aboard the Skylab or on the lunar surface. Chaffin also teamed up with Richard Gerald Snyder, a professor of anthropology and director of the UM Transportation Safety Institute’s Life Science Division, and Clyde Owings, a professor of pediatrics and bioengineering, to produce a strength prediction model of young children that was used to set safety standards for toys and other objects that could be hazardous when manually handled. In addition, Richard Snyder, Don Chaffin, and Rodney Schutz (a PhD student in IOE) also produced the first three-dimensional (3D) kinematic model of the human torso that was then used to predict maximum reach capabilities in vehicles.
Thus, by 1979, the Human Performance and Safety Engineering Laboratory was able to augment the annual National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Training Grant funding of $192,000 with contracts and grants of more than $600,000 from Western Electric, ALCOA, Kaiser, United Airlines, NASA, NITSA, NIH, Jewel Food Stores, Owens-Corning Fiberglas, General Tire, Firestone, and Dayton Tire and Rubber Companies. This total annual funding would be the equivalent to about $3.2 million in 2014.
Based on the magnitude of the work being done, the five IOE faculty members associated with the Human Performance and Safety Laboratory sent a proposal to Dean David Ragone in 1979 to change the name of the laboratory to the Center for Ergonomics and to have the director report to the dean of the College of Engineering. This proposal indicated that the laboratory’s combined external funding was providing partial support for 13 faculty members, six staff members, 33 graduate students, and six undergraduate students. The proposal also indicated that in the prior 10 years the lab had supported 130 students who had received MS degrees and 10 students who had received PhD degrees.
7.2. The Center for Ergonomics is Born
Given the success of the faculty members involved with the Human Performance and Safety Engineering Laboratory, the name Center for Ergonomics was confirmed by the regents of the University in November 1979. Gary Herrin served as the first director of the center from 1979 to 1981. After serving as chair of the IOE Department for four years, Chaffin became director of the Center for Ergonomic in 1982 and served in that capacity until 1998, when Thomas Armstrong, who had moved his primary faculty appointment from the School of Public Health a few years earlier, became the third director of the center.
Education in ergonomics had expanded in the department during the late ’70s, as indicated in the list of IOE courses shown earlier. Each faculty member developed specialized graduate courses in different aspects of ergonomics, and the department hosted formal seminars and workshops by experts from around the world in this growing intellectual discipline. Several introductory undergraduate courses were also developed for IE and other engineering students. That the quality of the educational program in ergonomics and safety engineering was recognized by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is evident by the fact that they continued to renew their training grant for the next 35 years.
It was also about this time the faculty started offering a series of short courses for engineers and practicing safety and health care professionals. Les Galley was hired in 1982 as a projects manager and director of continuing education in the center. In this capacity, Galley helped organize five to nine short courses annually and helped coordinate the center’s work with various companies. In 1985, Randy Rabourn took over Galley’s position and, with the advent of the NIOSH Educational Resource Center Grant that had been established since 1982, became the director for the continuing education courses at the Center for Occupational Health and Safety Engineering, which at times numbered more than 20 courses annually. The ergonomics short courses were very popular, sometimes being attended by over 200 people, and were often offered three times each year throughout the ’80s and early ’90s.
As mentioned earlier, Jim Foulke joined the IE department in 1960 to develop advanced instrumentation as part of the Human Performance Laboratory. Later, in 1981, Charles Woolley joined Foulke in designing and building very advanced hardware and software systems to measure and analyze human performance attributes of all kinds, such as: metabolic energy rates, human muscle strength, eye movements, muscle contraction, and fatigue states via such means as electromyograms and motion capture. Foulke and Woolley also developed and taught courses describing contemporary human measurement systems.
Sheryl Ulin joined the center staff in 1985. Her expertise is in organizing and conducting field studies and using psychophysical methods to quantify discomfort levels. Ulin and Rabourn also established an ergonomics training and job analysis program for small to medium-size companies in Michigan, which has been continually funded by the state of Michigan since 1992. Finally, it is necessary to recognize Pat Terrell, who oversaw the production of a myriad of reports and grant proposals over 30 years with the center, as well as Kelley Cormier, the Center’s Administrator for many years, Patricia Cottrell who worked closely with Randy Rabourn to organize many of the continuing education courses, and Richard Sullivan, who as Center Receptionist handled many different, daily requests.
Other faculty members who have played a major role in the center as research scientists are Laurence Fine and Alfred Franzblau, both occupational physicians and professors of environmental health sciences, and Robert Werner, professor and chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the VA Medical Center. As mentioned earlier, James Albers, a professor in the Department of Neurology, worked closely with IOE professor Gary Langolf to establish the behavioral effects of occupational exposures to various neurotoxins. These faculty members brought a much needed clinical component to the Center for Ergonomics. In addition, Paul Green, who had received a joint PhD in IOE and psychology from the University in 1979 and was working as an assistant research scientist at the Transportation Research Institute, started developing and teaching courses in ergonomics in the department. Many of Green’s studies over the years have been done in collaboration with students and staff associated with the Center for Ergonomics. Currently, he is an adjunct associate professor of IOE and a research scientist in the Transportation Research Institute.
7.3 The Importance of External Shared Funding
7.3.1. The Ford Grant
By 1980, the Ford Motor Company, along with other domestic auto companies, was still struggling to recover from the ramifications of a smaller domestic car market and some well-publicized product quality and reliability issues. Ford executives believed a new management-labor paradigm was needed and decided to elevate the union’s power through what they called employee involvement programs. As part of this trend, the Ford manufacturing executives sought the assistance of faculty members in the Center for Ergonomics. Ford agreed to provide the center with $400,000 annually for five years (the total grant amount would be the equivalent of more than $5 million in 2014). In return the faculty members would establish a series of ergonomics studies in several Ford plants to determine how changes in work conditions, tools, and processes could prevent worker injuries and improve product quality. Within a year eight PhD students were conducting research on ergonomics issues in the manufacture of Ford vehicles. The center’s faculty also collaborated with Jeff Liker, an expert in organizational management who had joined the IOE faculty in 1982. This collaboration resulted in the production of training books and videos that the Ford management and the UAW then used to train engineers, safety officers, and union leaders on how to perform fundamental ergonomic studies in all their plants. Several years later GM and Chrysler used these training materials as the basis for the development of plant-level ergonomics programs that are still in use by many companies besides those in the automotive sector.
7.3.2. Expanding the NIOSH Training Grant
An important faculty addition occurred in 1984 when W. Monroe Keyserling joined the department as assistant professor of IOE. Keyserling had been serving on the faculty at Harvard University’s School of Public Health after receiving his PhD from UM five years earlier. His research concentrated on improving the field methods used to evaluate occupational-related musculoskeletal stresses and safety hazards, postural fatigue, and slip-and-fall hazards, which were of major concern in various manufacturing operations. Keyserling became the director of the NIOSH Occupational Safety Engineering Training Program shortly after arriving, and during the late ’90s Directed the Center for Occupational Health and Safety Engineering, which in 1982 had become the UM umbrella organization for several NIOSH-sponsored occupational health and safety training grants in IOE, industrial hygiene, occupational medicine, and occupational health nursing. The grant for the Center for Occupational Health and Safety Engineering also provided support for a series of annual short courses for professionals in the field of occupational health and safety. The training grant had two effects on the center faculty. First, faculty from various departments had to meet often to organize and host common seminars, perform curriculum planning, and advise students with a variety of backgrounds and interests. Second, students in the various departments were required to take courses outside their own department. This created a successful multidisciplinary teaching and research environment that at times involved more than 25 faculty members from the four occupational health and safety disciplines.
7.4. Center Faculty in the 1990s—Growing the Perceptual and Cognitive Area
As described in chapter 6, some turnover in the IOE faculty affected the orientation of the research within the center. One such change occurred in 1986 when Jay Elkerton joined the faculty, replacing Devinder Kochhar in the area of perception and cognitive-related aspects of computer-generated displays. Kochhar had left to join the Bell Laboratory’s human factors staff. Four years later, in 1991, Elkerton left to join the research staff at Hewlett-Packard. He was replaced by Yili Liu, who had acquired his PhD from the University of Illinois under the guidance of Chris Wickens, a highly regarded human factors and cognitive scientist. At the center, Liu established a successful research program on cognitive modeling and explored the importance of various cultural differences on the function and design of products.
Another personnel change occurred in 1989 when Gary Langolf was granted an early retirement. Shortly after, Bernard Martin from the National Institute for Transportation Safety Research in France joined the IOE faculty as an assistant professor. His research at the center focused on perceptual-motor control, especially in the presence of vibration, and in fundamental motion modeling. In 2004, Nadine Sarter joined the center from Ohio State University; she had demonstrated expertise in various types of auditory, visual, and tactile displays. Thus, by 2005, the center had six IOE faculty members, three in the physical ergonomics and biomechanics area (Armstrong, Chaffin, and Keyserling) and three in the perceptual and cognitive aspects of human-hardware systems (Liu, Martin, and Sarter), assisted by part-time faculty member Paul Green.
7.5. Visiting Faculty and Research Scientists
The IOE Department faculty members in ergonomics have been privileged to be assisted over the years by a number of visiting faculty from various countries. Following are a few of the individuals who have added greatly to the intellectual and operational environment of the center.
Shrawan Kumar was a visiting professor from the University of Alberta in 1983–1984. Kumar is a highly regarded scientist and author on the topic of human physiology as it applies to ergonomics problems and overexertion injuries. Kumar is professor of physical therapy and neurosciences and a fellow in the Royal Society of Canada.
In 1984, Hudson De Araujo Couto was a visiting professor. Couto is the chair of the Department of Occupational Medicine at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. His work in the center dealt with understanding and documenting the differences in physical work capacity between Brazilian and US workers involved in heavy manual labor.
In 1985–1986 the center hosted Issachar Gilad from the faculty of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Gilad is a well-known scientist in human motion analysis and biomechanics.
During the academic year 1988–1989 the center hosted Owen Evans, director of the Center for Ergonomics and Human Factors at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Evans is well known for his ergonomics publications on designing workplaces to be productive and safe for aging workers.
The center has also hosted a number of postdoctoral scholars, some of whom received their PhD degrees through research in the center. These included Don Bloswick (now professor of IE at the University of Utah), Arun Garg (now professor and chair of IE at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee), Mary Ann Holbein (now professor of kinesiology at Slippery Rock University), Maury Nussbaum (now chaired professor of industrial and systems engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University), Rob Radwin (now chaired professor in IE and past chair of bioengineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison), Mark Redfern (now professor and vice president of research at the University of Pittsburgh), Laura Punnett (now professor at University Massachusetts–Lowell), Zudong Zhang (now professor of mechanical engineering and orthopedics at the University of Pittsburgh), and Stephen Goldstein (professor of orthopedics and director of the Orthopedic Research Laboratory and later vice-provost for medical research at the UM and member of the National Academy of Engineering).
7.6. Impact of the Center for Ergonomics
The annual Ford grants, combined with funds from other companies and federal agencies, provided financial support that averaged more than $900,000 annually. These funds, and the NIOSH training grant funds provided the center faculty with the ability to attract and support about 15 to 20 PhD students annually throughout the ’80s and ’90s, as well as about 20 MS students. A total of 92 PhD degrees were granted to students who performed their research in the center between 1979 and 2005. Their research included such topics as an evaluation of various computerized ergonomic design methods, the effects of hand-tool vibration on tactility and discomfort, biomechanical models of the lower back when lifting, a computerized expert safety system, biomechanics of the hand and wrist during manual exertions, lower limb discomfort during prolonged standing, movement control in high-precision tasks, and multiple display scanning strategies. Appendix A.4 lists the names of those who earned IOE PhD degrees, including those obtained through research within the center.
It should also be noted that for more than 44 years NIOSH has continued to provide funding for the faculty and graduate students in the ergonomics program, making it not only the first engineering education program formally recognized by this federal agency in 1971 but also the longest continually funded program in ergonomics and safety. During this period the NIOSH program supported 234 students who were granted master’s degrees, and 66 students who earned PhD degrees in ergonomics and safety engineering. In addition, hundreds of other graduate and undergraduate students benefited from the rich diversity of ergonomics and safety courses provided by the faculty associated with the center over the years.
Many of the more than 20,000 alumni from both the academic degree programs facilitated by the center and from the many ergonomics short courses for practicing professionals have achieved notable leadership positions in industry, government, and academic institutions. This is best exemplified in the US automobile industry, which is recognized throughout the world for its use of ergonomics to improve the health and safety of its workers and the quality of its products. Many graduates from the ergonomics programs have led this development, which has contributed to injury rates in automotive manufacturing plants dropping to less than one-third what they were in the early ’90s. They have also provided much of the leadership now being sought by other industries that are striving to adopt effective ergonomics programs.
More than 1,300 papers, books, book chapters, and technical reports have been produced by the faculty and staff members associated with the Center for Ergonomics since its founding in 1979. Occupational Biomechanics, a textbook written by Don Chaffin, Gunnar Andersson, and Bernard Martin in 1984 is in its fourth edition and has been adopted by over 200 universities at various times, according the publisher, John Wiley and Sons.
Several software programs meant to assist practicing engineers and safety and health professionals have been produced by the faculty and staff of the center, such as the 3D Static Strength Prediction ProgramTM and Energy Expenditure Prediction ProgramTM. The University has licensed these two programs to more than 3,000 individuals and companies around the world since the mid-1980s, and they remain as one of the first and most successful software technology transfer ventures that the University has undertaken.
7.7. The Human Motion Simulation Laboratory
The Human Motion Simulation (HUMOSIM) Laboratory was initiated in 1998 by Don Chaffin within the Center for Ergonomics to study and model how various people move and perform exertions in a large variety of manual tasks. The success of the HUMOSIM Laboratory was ensured by the intellectual leadership provided by Julian Faraway, from the Department of Statistics, and Matthew Reed, who was at the time an associate research scientist in the UM Transportation Research Institute. Faraway later accepted a chaired professorship at University of Bath in the United Kingdom, and Reed became a research professor and director of the Life Sciences Division within the UM Transportation Research Institute. Others from the center who guided early research in the HUMOSIM Laboratory were IOE professors Bernard Martin and Thomas Armstrong, and mechanical engineering professor Brent Gillespie. For the first seven years the lab’s funding was provided by a consortium of companies and federal agencies. These organizations were involved in using human simulation algorithms to evaluate and improve their products and work environments. This consortium included Chrysler, Ford, GM, Toyota, Navistar, Lockheed Martin, the US Postal Service, the US Army TACOM (Tank-automotive and Armanments Command), and the UM Army Automotive Research Center. These groups provided more than $700,000 annually between 1999 and 2005.
Though several analytical methods were being used to simulate human motions, primarily for gaming and movie productions in the late ’90s, the only criterion that seemed to apply to these was that the simulated motions had to appear to be realistic, though many obvious flaws were apparent when these early motion simulations were closely observed (e.g., feet that slid on the floor rather than being lifted while a character was walking or turning, eyes that didn’t move with the hands, fingers that didn’t deform when grasping).
Considering that major engineering design decisions could rest on the simulations of people using and manufacturing products, a much more robust and accurate human motion technology was needed. In consultation with the sponsors, four criteria for human simulations were established to guide the activities within the HUMOSIM Laboratory:
- Simulated motions must be based on real human motion data to have internal construct validity and empirical validity.
- Models of motions should be able to represent motions not in an existing database; that is, they should have extrapolation capability.
- Models should be computationally fast and portable for real-time simulations.
- Models should automatically adapt and use new motion data to become more robust in predicting novel motion situations of interest to a designer.
Meeting these criteria requited the running of more than 200,000 laboratory studies of different people reaching, grasping, moving objects, walking, and carrying objects. Sophisticated 3D motion-capture systems were used to document these motions, and the resulting kinematic data were placed in a standardized and well-documented database created and maintained by Charles Woolley. The sponsoring organizations were granted free access to the database, as were other organizations that wished to model the data. By 2000, the HUMOSIM Laboratory was supporting 12 PhD students and six MS and BS students annually. Models were created that used a variety of functional regression, kinematic optimization, and biomechanical methods to meet the four criteria.
Between 1998 and 2005, 96 papers and technical reports were published on the lab’s work. Most importantly, under the direction of Reed a general-purpose kinematic framework was created that allowed the modeling results to be used to predict a wide variety of common motions. By referencing this framework, users of a commercial computer-aided design (CAD) system that included a human avatar could access a diverse set of data-driven motions in their CAD simulations, thus forgoing the need to perform additional time-consuming and expensive human motion laboratory studies. For more information about the HUMOSIM Laboratory, see its website: www.HUMOSIM.org.
7.8. The Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center
Design of equipment and tasks to accommodate persons with the broadest range of physical and mental capacities is an important application of ergonomics. The Center for Ergonomics has conducted two major rehabilitation projects. First, the Michigan Bureau of Rehabilitation Services and General Motors supported work concerned with development of workplace accommodations from 1978 to 1983. A field team from the center visited a number of Michigan industries with a mobile laboratory to demonstrate tools and procedures for analyzing jobs and identifying possible employment barriers. In addition, the project offered a number of short courses to train rehabilitation counselors from the state of Michigan and safety, health, and rehabilitation coordinators from Michigan employers. This project brought together the faculty and a number of students affiliated the Center for Ergonomics in one way or another at that time. Arthur Longmate, a PhD candidate in IOE coordinated the field visits and data collection with the mobile laboratory. Don Chaffin, Gary Herrin, and Monroe Keyserling worked on developing strength testing protocols and determining applications for early whole-body biomechanical and metabolic prediction models. Louis Boydston worked on developing models for describing 3D reach capacities for seated workers, and Tom Armstrong coordinated the overall project.
From 1997 to 2002, the Center for Ergonomics was home to a Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) supported by the National Institute for Rehabilitation Research. The RERC utilized a web-based model to focus research on developing tools to determine job demands and worker capacities, identify gaps in how job-worker matching was being done, and develop interventions to better match a person’s capabilities with job demands. The RERC emphasized primary and secondary rehabilitation of persons with chronic musculoskeletal disorders. It brought together investigators and students from the Center for Ergonomics (Armstrong, Chaffin, Martin, Keyserling, Koester, Ulin, Rabourn, Foulke, and Woolley), the School of Public Health (Franzblau), and the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (Haig, Werner, and Levine) who collaborated on a number of research initiatives and demonstrated their applications. The RERC was codirected by Armstrong, Haig, Levine, and Werner. The RERC also helped to support an active outreach and continuing education program at a national level (Coordinated by Rabourn and Ulin). The Center for Ergonomics facilitated the research, which involved faculty members and students from the IOE Department, School of Public Health, and Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. A number of field and laboratory studies were completed over the period of the grant that provided new knowledge and tools for preventing work disability due to musculoskeletal disorders. A website (see the image of the original home page) was developed to provide RERC resources, including an extensive job database available to others working in the field.
7.9. Some Final Comments about the Center for Ergonomics
It is worth noting that all of the faculty members associated with the Center over the years have maintained a high level of scholarship. More than 1,300 ergonomics reports, journal articles, papers in proceedings, book chapters, and books have been published between 1979 and 2005. Such an archive of ergonomics knowledge, most of which is available through the center’s website, continues to be recognized by other organizations. The faculty associated with the center have also received many distinguished honors and awards for their work from a large variety of scientific and professional organizations throughout the world. Most importantly, many of the graduate students who have passed through the center have gone on to distinguished careers in academia and industry.
In summary, in many different ways the Center for Ergonomics has provided the knowledge, tools, and trained professionals needed to improve the well-being and safety of countless numbers of workers and consumers throughout the world. It has been an exciting time for the center, and this continues to be the case as the 21st century appears to have brought a growing public interest in convenience and safety in all types of products, services, and production facilities. Much has been accomplished within the center, but much remains to be done. The IOE Department has provided an excellent home for the center over the years, and though many faculty members from other departments have participated in the research and educational programs supported by the center, the organizational and administrative support provided by the IOE Department and the College of Engineering has allowed the center to thrive. In essence, over 44 years, the many outstanding accomplishments of the people associated with the center are proof that the University of Michigan’s policy of actively encouraging groups of faculty members from various departments, colleges, and schools to work together on large and important societal issues has been extremely valuable to the nation.
