Bio - Raymond B. Landis

Dr. Raymond B. Landis is Dean Emeritus of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology at California State University, Los Angeles, having served as Dean for a sixteen-year period from 1985-2001.

Dr. Landis received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. degree in Engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles. For five years, he worked as a Member of the Technical Staff at Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International in Canoga Park, California.

In 1967, Dr. Landis joined the faculty of the School of Engineering and Computer Science at California State University, Northridge where he remained until 1985. His technical areas of specialty are heat transfer, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and numerical analysis. He is a former chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at CSU Northridge.

Dr. Landis is a nationally recognized expert on engineering student success and on minority engineering education. He is viewed as the “father” of Minority Engineering Programs (MEPs) in the United States. His many publications and resource materials can be found on the Discovery Press website (www.discovery-press.com ).

In 1973, he founded the first Minority Engineering Program (MEP) in California at CSU Northridge and served as its director for ten years. During this period, Dr. Landis served as academic advisor and mentor to over 800 minority engineering students. In order to involve other faculty, he initiated the Faculty Advisors for Minority Engineering Students (FAMES) program to train faculty to be effective as teachers, academic advisors, mentors, and role models to ethnic students. FAMES was replicated on seven CSU campuses involving faculty from many academic disciplines.

Dr. Landis was a leader in an initiative to establish MEPs at other California universities. During 1983/84, he served as Director of University Programs for the Statewide MESA Organization at UC Berkeley. Currently, twenty California engineering colleges operate MEPs based on his "community building/collaborative learning" model.

At CSU Northridge, Dr. Landis also initiated and directed four precollege programs: Upward Bound; Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA); NSF Research Apprenticeships for Minority High School Students (RAMHSS); and the DOE Prefreshman Engineering Program (PREP).

Dr. Landis is widely published and a frequent speaker on minority engineering education. He edited the NACME/NAMEPA Handbook on Improving the Retention and Graduation of Minorities in Engineering which documents the MEP model. He authored a widely distributed monograph for students titled "Academic Gamesmanship: Becoming a 'Master' Engineering Student." His NACME monograph titled "Retention by Design: Achieving Excellence in Minority Engineering Education" provides a blueprint for effective approaches for improving minority engineering student academic success (See: www.csun.edu/~ecsdean/docs/retention_by_design.doc ).

Dr. Landis has been actively involved in the dissemination of these approaches. He has served as a technical consultant to over sixty universities, assisting them with the development of their MEPs. Over 400 engineering faculty and MEP staff attended his three-day NSF Chautauqua Short Course titled "Achieving Excellence in Minority Engineering Education" over a six year period. In 1992, he traveled to South Africa under the sponsorship of the United States Information Agency to lecture and conduct workshops on successful approaches to minority engineering education. He served as a technical consultant to the ARCO Foundation’s minority engineering student retention program. Through this program, over a ten year period the ARCO Foundation awarded over $7 million to MEPs at forty-four universities to implement his “community building/collaborative learning” MEP model.

In 1995, Dr. Landis completed a three-year NSF Curriculum Development grant "Improving Student Success through a Model 'Introduction to Engineering' Course." An outgrowth of this grant is his text Studying Engineering: A Road Map to a Rewarding Career, now in its 4th edition. Since its publication in 1995, the text has been used by over 100,000 students at more than 300 institutions across the United States in Introduction to Engineering courses that have a focus on student development. Recently, the book has been adapted for the South African context by Tobia Steyn at the University of Pretoria and published by Protea Book House.

Dr. Landis is actively involved in providing support to instructors of “student success” courses. From 1995-2001 and 2007-2012, he conducted a three-day, NSF-sponsored Chautauqua short course titled “Enhancing Student Success Through a Model Introduction to Engineering Course” Over 800 engineering faculty and student support staff attended this course. From 1996-2000, he published and widely disseminated a semi-annual newsletter titled Success 101, which provided a forum for the sharing of ideas among individuals teaching such courses. He authored a comprehensive “Instructor’s Guide” for Introduction to Engineering courses having a “student development/student success” focus.

For five years, Dr. Landis offered an innovative course titled “Introduction to Engineering for High School Teachers and Counselors.” The course, designed to improve the engineering guidance skills of high school teachers and counselors, has been disseminated widely and has been replicated by other engineering schools.

Dr. Landis is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Vincent Bendix Minorities in Engineering Award and the Dow Outstanding Young Faculty Award of the American

Society for Engineering Education and the Reginald H. Jones Award of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering. He is a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education, served for four years on the Executive Board of the ASEE Engineering Dean's Council, and received the ASEE Centennial Medallion for "extraordinary leadership and service in engineering education." He was recognized by the Transportation Foundation of Los Angeles with the 1998 Spirit of Los Angeles Award, and in January, 1999, was one of the first six individuals inducted into the National Association of Minority Engineering Program Adminstrators (NAMEPA) "Hall of Fame" for "exceptional contributions to the Minority Engineering Effort.

In 1999, Dr. Landis was selected as the first recipient of the $20,000 Wang Family Excellence Award for extraordinary accomplishments as an administrator in the California State University System. Also in 1999, he received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. He was honored as one of 100 outstanding college leaders of the 20th century in the January, 2000 issue of Black Issues in Higher Education magazine.