Posted on July 20, 2004 at 11:56 a.m.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Business Dean Robert Holmes, Ph.D., has been elected a fellow of the Society for Design and Process Science (SDPS).

An SDPS fellow is someone who has been responsible for significant achievements in design and process improvement and has made outstanding contributions to their field, including the integration of disciplines, theories and methodologies; industrial leadership and innovation; and education leadership and creativity.

“I am honored to have been elected a fellow of such a prestigious society,” Holmes said. “Being selected for the SDPS is especially meaningful to me because one of the society’s founders and chairman of the board was the late Dr. George Kozmetsky, co-founder of Teledyne Corporation and the former dean of the McCombs School of Business at my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Kozmetsky was someone that I have admired for more than 30 years.”

Fellow UAB faculty member, Professor Murat Tanik, Ph.D., in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, nominated Holmes. Tanik is an SDPS Executive Board member. In his nomination, Tanik noted Holmes’ transdisciplinary service to education, including the establishment of a top-ranked M.B.A. program in entrepreneurial studies, development of major collaborative activities with the UAB School of Engineering and his continued support for the Society for Entrepreneurship in Business and Engineering (SEBE) at UAB.

“I am very pleased that Dean Holmes joined the company of great men before him as a fellow of SDPS, including George Kozmetsky and Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon,” Tanik said. “What distinguishes SDPS fellows is their commitment to deep collaboration and intellectual integration among disciplines, social entities and nations.”

SDPS is dedicated to the study, understanding and use of design process science for the benefit of mankind. It is comprised of distinguished scientists, engineers, managers from academia, government and business involved in the exploration and utilization of integrated design and process methodologies and techniques applicable to real-world problems.

The only other UAB faculty elected as an SDPS fellow is David Allison, Ph.D., section head on statistical genetics in the Department of Biostatistics in the UAB School of Public Health and director of the Clinical Nutrition Research Center.