ENGINEER SPOTLIGHT: David Wormley - A Man of Vision
Like father, like son. That’s true of a number
of engineers, and David Wormley, the dean of engineering
at Penn State and the president of ASEE, is no exception.
His father was a mechanical engineer and a factory manager
for John Deere when David was growing up in Dubuque,
Iowa. “I used to walk through the factory on quite
a few Saturday mornings and was interested in both the
design and manufacturing part of engineering, so when
the time came to make my decision, it seemed natural
to go into mechanical engineering.” He assumed
that, like his father, he would one day end up in industry.
That changed when he went to the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT).
The fact that he chose MIT was the result of one of
those seemingly insignificant events that sometimes
carry life-changing possibilities. A representative
from the university came to Dubuque to give a talk when
Wormley was in the ninth grade. “I remember looking
over at my friend,” Wormley recalls, “and
we said, ‘Well, let’s go to MIT. It sounds
like a great place.’” Three years later,
when Wormley was trying to decide where to go to college,
he remembered that information session and applied to
MIT. At the time, he was living in Germany where his
father managed another John Deere plant. He was accepted
and headed to Boston in late summer of 1958. A surprise
was in store. “A couple of days into the fall
semester I was walking along the Charles River and looked
up and there was my friend from Dubuque. He had come
to MIT to study engineering, too.”
Wormley spent the next decade racking up his B.S.,
M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. Along the way he developed a
love for teaching that steered him away from industry
and into academia. “I helped develop courses in
systems and dynamics and taught at both the undergraduate
and graduate levels and enjoyed it very much. There
was always a good opportunity at MIT to be involved
in both teaching and research.” He joined the
teaching faculty at his alma mater in 1968 and moved
up through the ranks, becoming department head and associate
dean of engineering, before leaving to become Penn State’s
dean of engineering in 1992 where he has been ever since.
The work, he says, is multifaceted and challenging.
“There are lots of elements to it. You’re
working with faculty, department heads, as well as university
administration to advance engineering education and
research in your college.” That requires a good
understanding of the cultural differences of the various
disciplines. “Different disciplines have different
ways of doing things. This not only applies in your
college but throughout the university. You have to articulate
the college’s goals and aspiration to your own
faculty, as well as to your university administration,
to alumni, donors and industrial partners.”
According to Jim Melsa, dean emeritus of Iowa State’s
College of Engineering and president-elect of ASEE,
Wormley has both the requisite intellectual and social
skills for the job. “First of all, Dave is not
only a deep thinker but a charming individual as well.
He makes you feel important even though he’s in
an important position himself—the type of person
you’d like to go to dinner with. Also, he leads
in a way so he accomplishes what he is trying to achieve
but people at the end think ‘We did it ourselves.’
He convinces people that his vision is their vision,
and they go about working diligently and pleasantly
for him. He is a leader who leads very quietly—and
very effectively.”
Partnership With Industry
One of the areas where Penn State has taken an aggressive
role is in promoting close cooperation between industry
and the university. Wormley points to the Learning Factory,
which began shortly after he arrived at Penn State,
as a great example of this partnership. The program,
created in conjunction with faculty from the University
of Washington, Seattle, and the University of Puerto
Rico at Mayagüez, is used for many industry-sponsored
projects, where industry defines what the objectives
are and students take an idea and follow it right through
to prototype. The lessons students learn in the Learning
Factory are invaluable. “It’s important
for students to have ideas, conceptualize them and evaluate
them. We hope to expand the Learning Factory to accommodate
even more students in the future,” he says.
Penn State also offers a wide array of co-ops and
internships. Although the university is not one of the
few schools that have co-ops as a requirement to graduate,
Wormley says many of his engineering students are keen
participants in the program, including a growing number
who work abroad in Europe and Asia. “International
experience is becoming more and more important all the
time,” he says. “One of our themes is that
our graduates should aspire to become world-class engineers,
and one attribute of that is to become more aware of
the world around. Many projects now are jointly undertaken
by U.S. engineers with Asian and European engineers.
This international experience will give them a much
broader global perspective. Also, in the future our
engineers will not only be competing with these graduates
from places like China and India and Europe but co-operating
with them as well.”
Despite all the changes in teaching engineering over
the course of his years at Penn State—Wormley
points to a greater focus on written and oral skills
as well as an emphasis on the entrepreneurial and innovative
aspects of engineering—one thing has remained
the same: “People who graduate with a strong foundation
are going to have a lot of options.” They will
be the ones, Wormley says, who will be best able to
adapt to the ever-changing demands of a rapidly evolving
profession. “The half-life of engineers now is
five years. You have to stay up-to-date with technology,
either through distance courses offered by universities
or short courses offered by industry. Companies tell
us that most new graduates can expect to change jobs
three to five times in their lifetimes—if not
more. They may also develop in other areas. I just got
an e-mail from a colleague saying that the largest percentage
of CEOs from Fortune 500 companies come from the engineering
discipline.”
He says the challenge of attracting enough students
from K-12 into engineering has been well chronicled
by the National Academies report “Rising Above
the Gathering Storm.” “We have to have strong
cooperation between science and engineering faculties
with K-12 students and teachers so students get an appreciation
of how they can contribute to society by a career in
engineering. This has to happen early because we already
losing students by middle school and junior high.”
In his role as ASEE president, Wormley says he has
emphasized this as the Year of Dialogue. “We’re
organizing so that every single regional meeting of
ASEE will have discussions of elements coming from “Rising
Above the Gathering Storm.” We will also be looking
at the changes that we should be making in engineering
education so that our students will learn better and
learn what is appropriate.” A second goal, he
says, is to expand ASEE’s activities to communicate
and cooperate with people around the globe so we can
reach out to our colleagues from around the world. “There’s
a lot we can learn from them.”
Sharing ideas is something that Wormley has already
encouraged far beyond the grounds of Penn State. From
2002 to 2005 he served as chair of the Engineering Deans
Council (EDC), a group that puts on a public policy
forum in Washington every February with leaders from
industry and academia to talk about pressing issues
in engineering education and to exchange best practices
among the schools of engineering in the United States.
Paul Peercy, dean of engineering at the University of
Wisconsin, says that Wormley fulfilled that role admirably.
“As chair of EDC, David fostered an open, collaborative
and cooperative spirit among deans of colleges of engineering.
He’s a visionary leader, and his work as chair
was further evidence of that.”
Wormley and his wife, Shirley, have two children.
Linda, the older of the two, has carried on the engineering
tradition into a third generation; she graduated with
a degree in mechanical engineering with an emphasis
on biomedical and worked as a physical therapist. His
younger daughter, Janet, earned an undergraduate degree
in mathematics and political science and later earned
an MBA before taking a job in finance. What spare time
he has is devoted to reading, tennis and hiking in the
hills of Pennsylvania, something he says is particularly
enjoyable in the fall.
Even though he has accomplished many objectives in
his 14 years at Penn State, he still feels “there’s
a lot of things left to be done.” He points to
the need to encourage more women and minorities to study
and teach engineering as one particular goal. There
is also the continuing challenge of graduating engineers
who can truly contribute to society in today’s
global context. “These are big challenges,”
Wormley says, “but the future of America’s
success as a center of engineering excellence depends
upon our fulfilling both of these objectives.”
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