Corina Sandu, associate professor of mechanical engineering, Virginia Tech, has received the Society of Automotive Engineers International's Forest R. McFarland Award.

Established in 1979, this award recognizes individuals for their outstanding contributions toward the work of the automotive society's Engineering Meetings Board in the planning, development, and dissemination of technical information through technical meetings, conferences, and professional development programs or outstanding contributions to its operations in facilitating or enhancing the interchanges of technical information.

Sandu, who is also the director of the Advanced Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory at Virginia Tech, focuses her research on multibody dynamics modeling, uncertainty quantification and propagation, parameter estimation, soil and terrain modeling, on-road and off-road vehicle dynamics, tire and track modeling, and terramechanics. Sandu is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the elected secretary of the its Design Engineering Division Executive Committee. She has served as the chair of its Vehicle Design Committee for three years, and is the Vice-Chair of the SAE Chassis and Suspension Committee.  She is also an active member of the International Society for Terrain-Vehicle Systems.

Sandu is the editor-in-chief of the SAE International Journal of Commercial Vehicles, editor-in-chief of the Journal for Automotive and Transport Engineering, editor of the Journal of Terramechanics, associate editor of the ASME Journal of Vibration and Acoustics, and editorial board member of the International Journal of Vehicle Systems Modeling and Testing. Sandu is a member of the SAE Ground Vehicle Reliability Committee's Terrain Modeling and Characterization group, the Women Engineers Committee, and the Vehicle Dynamics Committee's Tire Modeling group.

SAE International is a global association of more than 138,000 engineers and related technical experts in the aerospace, automotive, and commercial-vehicle industries.  SAE International's core competences are life-long learning and voluntary consensus standards development.  SAE International's charitable arm is the SAE Foundation, which supports many programs, including A World in Motion® and the Collegiate Design Series™.

The McFarland award is administered by the board and honors the late Forest R. McFarland, who was himself an outstanding session organizer, a chairman of the Passenger Car Activity and a member of the board.  Funding for this award is through a bequest by McFarland to the society.

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