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BRENT W. WEBB

Academic Vice President and Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Brigham Young University
BSME ’81, MSME '82, PhD ME '86

“Engineers are taught how to define a problem and identify knowns and unknowns, how to apply fundamental principles, how to work in teams to attack the problem, how to estimate the tradeoffs and costs in a solution, and how to communicate the solution. Engineering education thus provides superb training that enhances the skill set for any professional pursuit. My PhD studies in the Purdue School of Mechanical Engineering provided all of this and more. I was mentored by extraordinary faculty who were more collaborative than competitive, who were passionately committed to the technical training of their students, who held themselves and their students to high standard, and who at the same time cared deeply for their students as human beings. I cannot imagine a better environment for engineering education than Purdue.”

Brent Webb has been a Mechanical Engineering faculty member at Brigham Young University since 1986. He has taught fundamental and advanced courses on thermodynamics, multimode heat/mass transfer, radiation heat transfer, and numerical techniques in heat transfer and fluid flow. A popular and demanding teacher, he has aspired to be a rigorous and energetic learner both in the classroom and the laboratory and has tried to set a similar standard for students. Professor Brent Webb received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Brigham Young University in 1981 and 1982. He then earned a PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 1986 from Purdue University.

Professor Webb has authored or co-authored over 180 refereed technical papers. He has been a research advisor for 30 MS and 12 PhD students, and 3 post-doctoral fellows. He has been PI or Co-PI on research totaling some $6 million. He has lectured both domestically and internationally relative to his research work, and his publications have been widely cited in the technical community.

Professor Webb is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award (1986), the BYU College of Engineering’s Outstanding Faculty Award (1990), the BYU Young Scholar Award (1991-1993), the BYU Alumni Professorship (1997-2000), and the BYU Karl G. Maeser Research and Creative Arts Award (1994). He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering, and has served as Associate Technical Editor of the Journal of Heat Transfer and the Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer. He has also been active in the international community, serving on the scientific committee for a number of international symposia, most recently as Chair of the International Symposium on Radiative Transfer (2010, 2013). Professor Webb has spent nearly half of his career in university administration, serving as Executive Director of the BYU Office of Research and Creative Activities from 1996 to 1999, as Associate Academic Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies from 2005 to 2011, and as Academic Vice President since 2011.