This year’s honoree, Dr. Keith J. Bowman, is dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT) and Constellation Professor of Information Technology and Engineering at UMBC, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Dr. Bowman began his academic career as a Purdue University Assistant Professor after receiving B.S. and M.S. degrees from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and a Ph.D. degree in materials science and engineering from U-M. He served as a visiting professor and received Alexander von Humboldt stipends for research at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany in 1996 and 2002 and he served as a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia in 2003. He is a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society and has held several division and society-wide positions. Awards at Purdue University include receiving the MSE Best Teaching Award and Purdue’s highest teaching award, the Charles Murphy Undergraduate Teaching Award. Professor Bowman’s name is also listed in the Purdue Book of Great Teachers.  In 2007, he received the Purdue College of Engineering Mentoring Award and he became the first Professor of Engineering Education (by courtesy) from MSE. From 2007 to 2011 he served as Head of the Purdue School of Materials Engineering. In 2012 he was invested as the first Duchossois Leadership Professor in the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Armour College of Engineering soon after joining as chair of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering. Prior to UMBC he served two years as dean of the College of Science & Engineering at San Francisco State University wherein he led more than four hundred faculty and staff and about six thousand majors.