The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Graduate School are cosponsoring a symposium to mark 50 years of graduate education in aerospace studies and 100 years of graduate education at Princeton.

The symposium, titled New Directions in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is set for Friday and Saturday, April 20 and 21, 2001, at the Frist Campus Center and includes a banquet at Procter Hall.

Symposium speakers include Joseph Charyk, retired chairman and chief executive officer of COMSAT; Anthony Evans, director of the Princeton Materials Institute; Daniel Goldin, the longest-serving administrator at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); Allen Haggerty '58, vice president, engineering, The Boeing Co.; Antony Jameson, T.V. Jones Professor of Engineering, Stanford University; Louis Lanzerotti, distinguished member, technical staff, Bell Labs/Lucent; Robert Nerem, director, Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Georgia Institute of Technology; John Sponyoe, chief executive officer, Lockheed Martin Global Telecommunications; and Rodney Tabaczynski, director, vehicle research, Ford Motor Co.

"This is a major historical event to have such eminent people with inspired visions about mechanical and aerospace engineering to come and talk to us about future directions," said Edgar Choueiri *91, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, chief scientist in the Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Lab, and one of the event's organizers. "The list of eminent individuals includes many attendees who are defining figures of industry, government, and academe in the MAE world. All graduate and undergraduate alumni and friends of the department are welcome to attend. The campus magnolias and other blossoms will hopefully cooperate to make this springtime symposium memorable."

Symposium topics include:

* Early years of MAE

* Communication satellites

* The future of the automobile

* Materials of the future

* The new biology in engineering

* New directions in aeronautics

* Design in the era of ultra-high-speed computers

* Nanotechnologies

* Space exploration

* Robotics and intelligent systems in space

* The future of space propulsion

Symposium organizers include Ronald Probstein *52, Norman Augustine '57 *59, Harvey Lam *58, H.H. Chiu *63, and Alexander Smits, MAE chairman.

Additional information, including registration materials, is available on the Web at: http://www.princeton.edu/~mae/SHL/SymPgm.html.