I hope you are all excited as we begin this year’s Engineers Week, and that you and your organizations have planned some events for this annual celebration of the profession! We had another terrific Alabama Regional Future City Competition (ARFCC) last month at UAHuntsville, where enthusiastic student teams from across the state and one school from Louisiana competed for the opportunity to travel to Washington, D.C. this week for the National Future City Competition face-off.

IEEE Huntsville Section will join engineers and scientists from corporations and government offices over the next few weeks as other students compete in the Alabama Council on Technology in Education (ACTE) Team Programming Challenge (TPC) and other technology competitions the following day at the Von Braun Center. Along with the ACTE events, IEEE Section and others will help judge and orchestrate the North Alabama Regional Science and Engineering Fair (NARSEF), immediately followed by Alabama Science and Engineering Fair (ASEF). UAHuntsville is hosting both these events.

If you are looking for ways to better connect with local teacher/students and heighten technology in area schools, please join us there. This week, community technical organizations including IEEE Section are also honoring several of our outstanding students, educators, and technical professionals at the annual Engineers Week Banquet, hosted this year by ASHRAE at the UAHuntsville Student Center. We congratulate the awardees listed below and hope we see you at some of our upcoming meetings!!

2011 Engineers Week Awards

UAHuntsville Student Chapter Outstanding Student – William Tyler Helms

William is a senior at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, pursuing a degree in computer engineering. He has been a member of UAHuntsville IEEE student branch for a year and a half. William was a major contributor to UAH team success at 2010 SoutheastCon, where UAH placed 5th out of 44 teams.

He is currently the Director of Communications for UAHuntsville student branch, which includes maintaining and posting significant events and activities to the website and also serves as the 2011 SoutheastCon project leader. He is an engineering coop, student, and IEEE student branch participant.

William serves as project leader with teammates to make this robot successful and relishes the competition challenge of designing, building, soldering, and programming the robot to meet objectives.

AAMU Student Chapter Outstanding Student – Taliah Buford

Ms. Taliah Buford is a junior from Birmingham, AL majoring in Electrical Engineering with a concentration in Computer Engineering.  She has a cumulative GPA of 4.0 over the past five semesters at Alabama A&M
University.

Taliah is multifaceted in her approach to education as demonstrated by involvement in numerous on campus organizations including IEEE, NSBE, SWE, and Alabama A&M University’s Honors Program.  She is President of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). In her spare time, Ms. Buford enjoys reading, sports, volunteering to tutor young girls at Girls Incorporated of Huntsville, and helping others.

Outstanding Educator – Dr. William Y. (Buddy) Bishop

Buddy Bishop is a retired civil servant, having served 34 years in senior level engineering positions on these ACAT I missile systems: Improved HAWK, TOW family of weapons, U.S. ROLAND, JAVELIN, and NATO Medium Extended Air Defense System. He served his final 12 Years Civil Service as Chief Engineer at NATO Medium Extended Air Defense System Management Agency (1999 – 2002) and Javelin Project Office (1990 – 1999).

Buddy has taught the electrical and electronics review portions for the Fundamentals of Engineering Examination and the Professional Engineering Examination Review Courses at UAH, Dept of Continuing Education and he is currently a part time Instructor, UAH Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept. Buddy teaches courses in Electronics (Jr. and Sr. level), an analog electronics graduate course, and mathematical analysis of continuous time systems. He began teaching at UA Huntsville in 1978, and now teaches EE416, Electronics II.

Buddy is a registered Professional Engineer and serves as Chairperson, UAH Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept, Industrial Advisory Board.

Outstanding Engineer – Susan K. (Kathy) Land

Kathy Land currently works in Army civil service at Missile Defense Agency (MDA), where she provides continued support for the MDA Ballistic Missile Defense Systems (BMDS) Concurrent Test Training and Operations (CTTO) effort as independent technical lead for software and simulations. She has more than 20 years past industry experience at Mitre and Northrop Grumman in software engineering methodology, information systems management, and software development team leadership. She served as 2009 IEEE Computer Society president, and currently serves on the Computer Society Board of Governors.  She served as vice president for standards and conferences and tutorials and works on the CS Standards Activities Board (SAB), Software and Systems Engineering Standards Executive Committee (S2ESC) and other CS boards and committees. Kathy received the IEEE Standards Association Standards Medallion in 2007.

Kathy authored Jumpstart CMM/CMMI Software Process Improvement: Using IEEE Software Engineering Standards (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). She is coauthor of Practical Support for CMMI-SW Software Project Documentation: Using IEEE Software Engineering Standards (John Wiley & Sons, 2005), Practical Support for ISO 9001 Software Project Documentation: Using IEEE Software Engineering Standards (John Wiley & Sons, 2006), and Practical Support for Lean Six Sigma Software Process Documentation: Using IEEE Software Engineering Standards (John Wiley & Sons, 2008). She also contributes to CS ReadyNotes and the CS PodCast program IEEE Talks Software Process.

<img src="http://www.ieee-huntsville.org/images/IEEE_Section_Awardees_files/image004.png"

Outstanding Service – Matthew (Matt) Spivey

Matthew Spivey is a software director at kSOLD, a Huntsville based gaming startup with developers from Seattle to New York.  Matthew’s experience includes developing software for both startups and defense contractors.

Matthew is a graduate of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he acquired a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a Master of Science in Software Engineering.  He demonstrated his expertise in human interface web skill when he conceived and developed the IEEE Huntsville website, which has achieved recognition from IEEE-USA headquarters for its innovative approach.