As the Director of the Learning Factory, he coordinated 150 industry-sponsored senior design projects each year for over 700 students in the College of Engineering. He also serves as the Director of the Product Realization Minor. His research interests include product family and product platform design, trade space exploration and multi-dimensional data visualization, and multidisciplinary design optimization, and he has co-authored over 200 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers to date. He is the recipient of the 2011 ASEE Fred Merryfield Design Award and has received numerous awards for outstanding teaching and research, including the 2007 Penn State University President's Award for Excellence in Academic Integration. He is a Fellow in ASME and an Associate Fellow in AIAA. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech, and his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University. Mr. Marcus Shaffer, Penn State Architecture Marcus Shaffer's research focuses on works, theories, and practices that engage the Machine as an architectural extension of our impulse to examine and re-make the natural world. This work includes building machines, automatons, and spiritual mechanisms that represent our earliest technological expression; the mechano-pagan influence of the Machine on modern/visionary architecture; and attempts to embody architectural knolwedge and craft in construction/fabrication technologies. As a designer and studio critic experienced with industrial and handcrafted means of making, he addresses architecture not only as the manifestation of our physical needs and cultural desires, but also as constructed form directly resultant from the combination of mind, machinery, materials, and process/labor. While Marcus studies and contributes to a critical discourse probing and defining the Machine in an architectural context, his historical/theoretical search is informed by, and applied to the design and fabrication of various Tectonic Machines. The agenda for these machines is a synthesis of our powerfully rationalized technologies with the potency of meaning found in our ritual practices-which includes building. Prof. Shaffer has a BFA in Industrial Design from the
