Awards and Recognition Committee Report for January 2011 Region 3 ExCom
Meeting

The R3 ARC had a good year in 2010, including presentation of the 2009 
awards at the SoutheastCon in Charlotte NC last March. The R3 ARC Chair 
Dev Palmer contributed as a member of both the IEEE-USA and IEEE MGA 
Awards and Recognition Committees.

A number of excellent nominations were received from across the region 
for the 2010 awards, which were reviewed by participating Area/Council 
Chairs. A tellers committee was convened during the week of January 20th 
to tally the results. The 2010 winners are:

Dr. Ralph Fehr, Florida West Coast Section – Outstanding Engineering 
Educator Award for excellence in student mentoring and engineering 
curriculum development.

SUMMARY: Dr. Ralph Fehr is a gifted teacher and educator who has 
expanded educational opportunities for engineers and students though out 
Florida in many ways. He found creative ways to keep alive a vibrant, 
relevant power engineering program at the University of South Florida 
(USF) even during periods of changing administrations and economic 
downturns. He enabled USF to offer a broad selection of relevant 
coursework at reasonable cost by recruiting able adjunct lecturers from 
local industries.

Dr. Christine Belcastro, Hampton Roads Section – Outstanding Engineer 
Award for outstanding technical leadership and contributions to 
Guidance, Navigation, and Control methods in support of Aviation Safety 
research.

SUMMARY: Over the past three decades, Dr. Belcastro has demonstrated 
outstanding technical leadership and sustained research contributions in 
the area of control systems technology with applications to aviation 
safety and aircraft control systems at NASA Langley Research Center. The 
focus of Dr. Belcastro's research and technical leadership has been on 
developing advanced technologies for improving aviation safety, with an 
emphasis on reducing aircraft loss of control accidents. She has 
authored or co-authored more than 50 technical publications and 
presentations for international conferences, workshops, and journals on 
these subjects, and has organized numerous technical sessions on these 
topics for international conferences. She has received numerous 
performance and achievement awards from NASA, both individually and as 
part of team efforts, throughout her career.

Dr. Kalpathy Sundaram, Orlando Section – Outstanding Service Award for 
contributions and service to the IEEE Orlando Section.

SUMMARY: Since 1991, Dr. Sundaram served the IEEE continuously at the 
Orlando Section, Florida Council, and Region 3. For the Orlando Section, 
Dr. Sundaram served as Electron Device Soceity (EDS) Chair, Education 
Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, Vice-Chair, Program Chair, Chair, Award 
Chair, Historian, PACE Chair. At the Florida Council level, Dr. Sundaram 
was PACE Chair, Vice-Chair and Chair, and also member of the Region 3 
Excom during his tenure as Council Chair. Currently he is Education 
Chair, Historian and PACE Chair for the Orlando Section. Since 2005, he 
has been Faculty Advisor for the IEEE UCF Students' Branch. During 2008 
and 2009, when Orlando section was in need of treasurer, Dr. Sundaram 
stepped in and served as the Treasurer for two years. He also handles 
the IEEE Orlando Section Technical Video Library.

The R3 ARC has one new initiative for 2011, which is to work with Karen 
Pedersen, Chair of the MGA Awards and Recognition Committee, to 
implement a Region 3 Outstanding Section Award using the MGA 
"MyReviewRoom" web system to manage nominations and evaluations. Once 
the system and procedure are fully developed the new award will be put 
to a vote by the R3 ExCom.

In addition, the R3 ARC program manual will be updated and revised to 
incorporate resources available on the web, and sample forms and 
documents will be uploaded to the R3 website.

One issue needing attention by the ExCom is a suggestion from Roger 
Grubic in the Florida Council. He noted that nominations for Outstanding 
Engineering Educator do not require recommendations from students or 
from the nominee's Department Chair. Also, nominations for Outstanding 
Engineer do not require a recommendation from the nominee's supervisor. 
He recommends that these requirements be added to the award criteria. 
The current criteria are lined up with those at the Section level below, 
and the IEEE-USA and MGA criteria above, in order to make it easier to 
nominate individuals for multiple awards. My recommendation as R3 ARC 
Chair is to leave the Region 3 criteria as they are and change them only 
in conjunction with changes in other IEEE award criteria. I intend to 
bring this issue up for comment during the next ExCom meeting.



Respectfully submitted,

Dev Palmer
Region 3 Awards and Recognition Committee Chair
dev.palmer@ieee.org