October, 2003, Charlestown, South Carolina
As chairman of the Awards Committee, I'm pleased to have the opportunity to give the Handbook's first Award of Merit to Dr. Mark Vangel.
The Award of Merit was conceived as the CMH-17 organization's highest honor. It recognizes major service toward advancing the goals of the handbook. The process established by the committee is that nominations for this award are passed along to the executive committee and handbook chairman for approval. When Mark's name was mentioned, there was unanimous agreement that he fit the model for the intent of this award. The award was actually made at the 2002 meeting, but because of Mark's new responsibilities, this is our first opportunity to actually give it to him. The Award of Merit is not given at every meeting, and indeed, there have been no additional nominations since Mark's.
For those of you that are new to CMH-17, Mark was the chairman of the Statistics Working Group, and our statistics guru for many years. For a handbook with the words "authoritative source of statistically-based characterization data" in our mission statement, this is clearly an important role. Mark came to us by way of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. His leadership gave us the rather impressive Chapter 8, and his guidance touched many other sections. In recent years he tackled the issue of equivalency in data, and was instrumental in developing the AGATE methodology being used in the General Aviation Community.
One of Mark's traits that has helped the Handbook tremendously is his appreciation for the fact that there are engineering and practical aspects of the Handbook statistics as well as the desire for statistical rigor. Although Mark is not a composites engineer, and strives for statistical accuracy, he has always been willing to acknowledge the need for engineering judgment. He has realized that what might be statistically significant may not be significant or of interest from an engineering standpoint. I remember being at many meetings where Mark begged for "real" data to test abstract methods. This has provided a welcome balance in the statistical guidelines in the Handbook. Another important trait was his ability, and patience to explain statistical concepts to other engineers. This frequently required multiple attempts using different physical examples to get the point across to those of us that were statistically challenged.
Mark stepped down as chair of statistics in 2002 because of a change of jobs. However, his legacy will remain with the handbook for decades to come.
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