Spring 2007

Valuing Educational Relationships -- Richard Stamper Wants Students to Put Everything into Perspective

Designing a better widget isn’t the key issue for tomorrow’s engineers. Rather, creating socially-conscious engineers that appreciate the consequences of their actions has become the emphasis of Richard Stamper’s popular mechanical engineering teachings at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

That’s why Stamper has developed a special case study course that examines engineering failures; has conducted research to design an adaptive halo device; has brought new projects to the college’s summer Operation Catapult program; and has helped advise the college’s efficient fuel mileage team.

And, yes, he does teach classes in kinematics, engineering statics and graphical communications, along with selected topics in design and thesis research.

“I see myself first as a mechanical engineer who specializes in product design. Then, I’m a teacher,” Stamper says.

However, it’s Stamper’s classroom skills that earned him the Dean’s Outstanding Teacher Award, RoseHulman’s ultimate teaching award, last year. He also has received RoseHulman’s Board of Trustees Scholar Award (2004), the Ferdinand Beer and E. Russell Johnston Outstanding New Mechanics Educator Award (2001) from the American Society for Engineering Education, and been recognized as Teacher of the Year by Rose-Hulman’s Triangle fraternity and The Rose Thorn student newspaper.

“Teaching is a lot of fun,” the associate professor of mechanical engineering admitted during an interview in his Moench Hall office. “Being around smart, creative people (students and faculty) is enjoyable. You get to take ideas and look at them from different angles.”

Stamper is teaching a relatively new special topics course this spring that’s examining engineering failures. Along with investigating the design defects that contributed to failures, Stamper is showing students the intricate network of relationships (government regulations, business,manufacturing, maintenance and legal) that may form the context behind the failure. Field trips allow students to meet engineers, lawyers and product designers that have dealt with past failures. Readings from such books as The Logic of Failure, Inviting Disasters: Lessons from the Edge of Technology and Minding the Machines: Preventing Technological Disasters provide psychological, economic and sociological viewpoints. Th course was first taught last spring.

“We’re adding context to the students’ academ ic experience,” Stamper says. “The engineering failures course brings perspective to the students’ undergraduate experience and helps them realize that they are getting into a business where they can do tremendous good and can also cause tremendous harm.”

Phillip Deaton, a senior mechanical engineering major, appreciates the course’s lessons, stating “This helped open my eyes to other sides that can contribute to product failures . . . I would say it (engineering failures) is as important as any other class I have taken at Rose-Hulman. I have talked to alumni and I have not found one person that has not been interested and wished there had bee a class exactly like it when they were at RoseHulman.” He added that Dow Chemical officials were interested in how course topics could help the manufacturing process when he begins work a a reliability engineer this summer.

Stamper appreciates the challenges of product development. He served as a design team leader and design engineer for General Electric Company (1988-94) and was an area manager for Bounty paper towels with Procter and Gamble (1985-86). He also gained international expe rience by spending a year working for General Electric in Yokohama, Japan, in 1992. Now, he serves as president of Stamper Medical Technologies, striving to develop a revolutionary adaptive halo orthosis for persons that suffer from cervical spinal injuries. The halo design eliminates pin loosening, one of the most common problems with current halos. Stamper’s three patents list student co-inventors and many of his scholarly papers include students as co-authors.

Stamper’s innovations in Rose-Hulman’s mechanical engineering curriculum have also included a required juniorlevel course that examines design elements of manufacturing processes and an independent study course which has an international design project with Japan’s Kanazawa Institute of Technology. The manufacturing design course was recommended from an industry advisory board, which wants RoseHulman graduates to have more practical knowledge of manufacturing processes. The international design project concluded with Stamper joining sophomore Daniel Soledad in making a technical presentation at KIT in February about an energy-efficient street lamp system.

As faculty adviser for Rose-Hulman’s Efficient Vehicles team, Stamper is providing advice as students strive to achieve 1,400 mpg or more through modifications to a single cylinder 3.5 horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine in a Society of Automotive Engineers national competition. He also serves as a faculty mentor for the college’s summer Operation Catapult program, encouraging high-school students toward careers in engineering and science. Stamper has brought new project to Operation Catapult in heat treatment of steels, creating a south facing chariot and designing a unique solar chimney.

“There is no better place to teach engineering than Rose-Hulman,” Stamper proudly states. “The real treat of teaching here is that we’re always looking to do what’s best for the students and creating better engineers. The faculty is allowed to be innovative. That makes this such an exciting place.”

That fact has been true for Stamper since he entered Rose-Hulman in 1981 to begin his studies in mechanical engineering. Rose-Hulman was the only college that he applied to attend. (“Here was a place that gets me,” he recalls.) He soon became active in residence life, serving as a Sophomore Adviser (SA) for the Speed residence hall and a Resident Assistant (RA) for two years in the Baur-Sames-Bogart and Scharpenberg residence halls. Graduating in 1985, Stamper went on to earn a master’s degree from Purdue University (1988) and a doctorate from the University of Maryland (1997).

“I received more from being an RA and SA than I appreciated at the time,” Stamper admits. “First of all, it allowed me to become friends with an amazingly talented group of individuals. It also made me think about things like how to provide and solicit feedback, organize groups, establish common expectations and resolve conflicts.”

Stamper went on to say, “Rose-Hulman values relationships. I like the student-faculty relationships that this place enables. That’s part of the institute’s magic. I don’t teach a better version of statics here, but I do provide a heightened level of engagement with the student that I hope adds value to the educational experience.”

And, similar to his Resident Assistant experience, it’s the relationships with his mechanical engineering faculty colleagues that Stamper has valued since his return to the Rose-Hulman faculty in 1998 after teaching for one year at Auburn University. He admired emeriti faculty Don Dekker, Bill Ovens and Mallory North –stealing nuggets of educational and engineering wisdom along the way –- and now appreciates the camaraderie with his current mechanical engineering colleagues.

“The thing that I didn’t appreciate as a student was the team structure of the mechanical engineering department,” he says.

“One of the most pleasant points about coming back has been to witness the closeness of the faculty. It’s a group of smart people that care about their students. For whatever reason, this little group clicks.”

And, being mechanical engineers, they’re hitting on all cylinders.