Swanson Analysis Services, Inc., and a resident of The Villages, Fla.,
is recognized internationally as an authority and innovator in the
application of finite-element methods to engineering.
In 1970-only four
years after he graduated from the Pitt School of Engineering with the
Ph.D. degree in applied mechanics-Swanson founded ANSYS, Inc., to
develop, support, and market the ANSYS program, a finite-element
software code he created that is used by a broad spectrum of industries
employing computer-aided engineering, among them the aerospace,
automotive, biomedical, manufacturing, and electronics industries.
Swanson served ANSYS as president, chief executive officer, and
director; at his retirement from ANSYS in March 1999, he was the
company's chief technologist. Headquartered in Canonsburg, Pa., with
more than 40 sales locations worldwide, ANSYS and its subsidiaries
today employ approximately 1,400 people and distribute products through
a network of channel partners in more than 40 countries.
John's on the left.
Prior
to founding ANSYS, Swanson was employed at Westinghouse Astronuclear
Laboratory in the stress analysis group in reactor design, the core
analysis and methods group, and the structural analysis group. It was
at Westinghouse that Swanson realized the significant resources
companies could save by using integrated general-purpose finite-element
software code to do the complex calculations engineers were then doing
manually.
In May 2004, Swanson was given what is considered to
be the highest award in the engineering profession, the American
Association of Engineering Societies' John Fritz Medal. Prior awardees
of the Fritz Medal include, among others, Orville Wright, Alexander
Graham Bell, Alfred Nobel, Thomas Edison, and George Westinghouse.
Swanson
has received many other prestigious honors throughout his career, among
them being named in 1986-87 Pittsburgh Engineer of the Year by the
American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), winning in 1990 the
Computers in Engineering (CIE) award for outstanding contributions to
the engineering and computing industries, selection by Industry Week as
one of the Top 5 of the Top 50 R&D Stars in the United States in
1994, election as an ASME Fellow in 1994, and receipt of the ASME
Applied Mechanics Award in 1998 and ASME Honorary Membership in 2003.
A
loyal and generous Pitt alumnus, Swanson has created at the University
the John A. Swanson Institute for Technical Excellence, which houses
the John A. Swanson Center for Micro and Nano Systems; the John A.
Swanson Center for Product Innovation; and the RFID (Radio Frequency
Identification) Center for Excellence. He also has established the John
A. Swanson Embedded Computing Laboratory in Computer Engineering and
the John A. Swanson Fund in Pitt's School of Engineering. In 1998,
Swanson was named a Pitt School of Engineering Distinguished Alumnus
and, in 2002, was inducted into the Cathedral of Learning Society,
which recognizes individuals who have donated $1 million or more to the
University.
No comments:
Post a Comment