Once stumped by math, alum has pursued lifelong love of mechanical things

BY DWIGHT DANIELS
Special to Rice News

An irony in Rice professor and alum Andrew Meade’s life was his forced enrollment in remedial math classes in high school.

	ANDREW MEADE

Now a renowned engineer and leading aerospace and aeronautics expert doing research for NASA and the Navy, Meade ’82 used to be stumped by mathematics even though he was enrolled in advanced placement classes in almost everything else.

“Math was a struggle for me,” said Meade, who was recently named chair of Rice’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. “I couldn’t remember the multiplication tables. I really didn’t have teachers who worked very hard to help me understand the mathematical concepts.”

But the son of an Air Force noncommissioned officer didn’t let that stop him. While his childhood was one of being uprooted constantly, he remembers being exposed by his dad to “wonderful flying machines” at new and varied locales. Yet at school he was often held back and asked to repeat classes when new teachers couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize he had already mastered the material.

It was a lifelong love of mechanical things — taking things apart and putting them back together — that stimulated Meade’s imagination and ambition. “I convinced myself I wanted to be either an engineer or a scientist, and somehow I knew I needed to understand math to do that,” he explained. “I decided I’d go to the library and started looking for books on the subject that appealed to me.”

Meade found a text titled “Algebra Made Simple” and took matters into his own hands. “I sat down and read it through and started teaching myself. Something clicked. The experience taught me that sometimes in education, you just have to take charge of your own destiny,” he said.

But he once again encountered still-skeptical teachers who made him pass repeated quizzes until they finally believed he should be allowed to advance. Such negative experiences drove home a point to Meade as a professor — never underestimate students. “I will bend over backwards for a student who is really interested in advancing,” he said. At Rice, he has supervised the studies and research projects of 25 graduate students and four postdoctoral fellows.

Meade, who graduated from Rice with a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering, earned his master’s degree and doctorate in the same discipline from the University of California at Berkeley. While Meade lived in California, his lifelong interest in aviation spawned active membership in a flying club and he piloted small aircraft.

His fascination with aviation has led to continuing research in experimental and numerical aerodynamics, with projects funded by NASA’s Ames and Langley research centers and the Office of Naval Research. He studies the application of machine learning tools to computational and experimental fluid dynamics. The goal is to apply this methodology to problems of flow simulation, data analysis, sensor fusion, pattern recognition and machine vision for experimental aerodynamics. The benefits of the research could extend beyond experimental aerodynamics and help advance areas such as autonomous adaptive aircraft control and areas unrelated to aviation, such as the development of artificial limbs, Meade said.

The professor is sought out as a mentor by other faculty members. He has delivered talks on how to survive the pitfalls of research, publishing and politics in academia. “I’ve made all the mistakes you can make,” he said jokingly, speaking from his book-lined office where scores of aircraft models and a flight simulator are on display. “I guess I should share what I had to learn the hard way.”

Meade is an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the American Physical Society. Off the job, he enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter.

— Dwight Daniels is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice.