Moneer Helu Age: 28
Student, University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA
UNDER THIRTY “I
’ve always been fascinated by huge ma- chines—tinkering with them, making them, trying to figure them out. I’d decided to be a mechanical engineer,” said Moneer Helu.
He’s Associate Director of the Laboratory for Manu- facturing and Sustainability (LMAS) at UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering, the school where he earned his PhD and MS after earning an SB at MIT. That fascina- tion has brought him pretty far already: “Throughout his career, Dr. Helu has been a talented and extremely motivated researcher who has consis- tently been a leader in many of our group’s activities,” wrote Moneer’s supervisor, LMAS Director David Dornfeld, chair of the Mechanical Engineering
final deliverable required is a robot that you make—a robot that’s supposed to accomplish a particular task,” Moneer explained. “At the end of the semester there’s a big competition. And throughout the entire semester you’re continually iterating the design of this robot to achieve this one task and, hopefully, win the compe- tition. It was really a fun class and it allowed me to explore the machine shop.
“To think of manufacturing as still some person on a line screwing in the same screw over and over every day— that’s just not accurate anymore.”
Dept. “His research accomplishments are substantial and well recognized in the manufacturing research com- munity even at this early stage of his career.” Moneer’s PhD thesis research analyzed the link be- tween manufacturing process operations and precision and the environmental impacts, energy, and material and resource utilization of a product over its entire life cycle. His most recent research involves developing data-driven tools for manufacturing. He has already authored or co-authored four peer-reviewed journal articles, seven peer-reviewed articles in proceedings/ symposia; and chapters in two textbooks, as well as given numerous presentations.
Not a slouch, then. But if you’re tempted to think that this is a fellow for whom everything comes eas- ily, you might be surprised to know that an event that helped to lead Moneer toward manufacturing engineer- ing was a decided failure.
“While at MIT I took a course in design and mecha- nisms, and a nice component of the course is that the
“I didn’t do well in the actual competition,” Moneer admitted, laughing: “I lost in the first round. One of my mechanisms, which had been working continuously up until that point, decided not to work. My robot suddenly wasn’t able to lift an object high enough to compete with its adversaries. It was pitiful! But
the whole thing really was a great experience. It opened my eyes to the machine shop and the different things you could do in manufacturing.”
Moneer hopes that the eyes of other young people can get opened to the modern world of manufacturing. “People still think of it as drudgery. They don’t realize the types of skills that are used and positions that are vastly available in manufacturing these days,” he said. “Manu- facturing engineers call up different technologies to im- prove systems and make cooler products—from turbine blades for a jet engine to biomedical devices. Machinists are always making something new, always figuring out interesting, clever ways to, say, fabricate a particularly challenging geometry. To think of manufacturing as still some person on a line screwing in the same screw over and over every day—that’s just not accurate anymore.” Moneer has recently accepted a position with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) where he expects he’ll continue to work on problems very relevant to manufacturing. ME
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THIRTY UNDER THIRTY PROFILES
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