NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Professor of Electrical Engineering George E. Cook has been named associate dean for research and graduate studies for the Vanderbilt School of Engineering.
"Dean Cook is one of our most experienced professors and is ideally suited to lead School of Engineering efforts in strengthening our research and graduate programs," says School of Engineering Dean Kenneth F. Galloway.
Former associate dean for research of the School of Engineering and director of the school’s Industrial Liaison and Technology Development, Cook is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Welding Society and has served on the Vanderbilt engineering faculty for 39 years.
He teaches classes in robotics and conducts research in industrial automation with an emphasis on welding automation. He holds a number of patents in that area, including several inventions dealing with sensing the location of the weld joint with the welding arc itself. This technology, coined "through-the-arc sensing," is widely employed throughout the world to allow arc welding robots to precisely locate and track the joints that they are welding together.
In 1981, Cook won the James F. Lincoln Arc Welding Foundation’s Gold Award and the following year he gained the Small Business High Technology Institute’s Franklin-Jefferson Award for the development of this technology. Among his other numerous awards are a NASA Space Act Award for Development, along with Dr. Kenneth R. Fernandez of NASA MSFC, of ROBOSIM (a robot simulation system), and a number of NASA Tech Brief awards dealing with innovations in welding and robotics.
A Vanderbilt alumnus with a bachelor of engineering, Cook received his master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee and his doctorate in electrical engineering from Vanderbilt.
Media contact: David Salisbury, (615) 343-6803
David.f.Salisbury@vanderbilt.edu