Wednesday, January 7, 2009

FAMU Mourns the Death of Professor Colin Benjamin

Colin O. Benjamin, a professor of engineering management in the Florida A&M University School of Business and Industry, passed away on Saturday, January 3.

“We are absolutely devastated over the loss of our friend and colleague, Colin Benjamin,” said SBI Dean Lydia McKinley-Floyd. “He was one of the most positive, productive and supportive members of the faculty. He will be sorely missed.”

He received his B.Sc in mechanical engineering from the University of the West Indies, an MSc in engineering production and management from the University of Birmingham, UK, an MBA from the Cranfield Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from the University of the West Indies. He had more than 20 years of international teaching and industrial and consulting experience. He held academic appointments at the University of Missouri-Rolla in the Department of Engineering Management and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Technology and Policy.

He served as principal/co-principal investigator on several research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF); Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME); and the Small Business Association (SBA). His work had been presented at numerous international conferences and published in leading journals in industrial engineering, engineering management and management science. His research interests focused on the areas of electronic commerce, risk management, quality function deployment, supply chain management, applications software, and technology commercialization.

Benjamin had successfully directed numerous consulting projects in a variety of industrial settings including assignments with several Caribbean companies and U.S. companies such as Philip Morris, American Automobile Association, John Deere, Houston Chronicle, and NASA-Langley Research Center.

He was a member of IEEE; Institute of International Education; American Society for Engineering Education and American Society for Engineering Management.

No comments: