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Dr. David L. Wells has been Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at North Dakota State University since January 2000. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in process engineering and production engineering systems design for conventional manufacturing, electronics assembly, biomedical products and micro-manufacturing. His instruction is characterized by heavy reliance upon project-based, design-centric learning. Course projects are drawn from real industrial applications with real industrial constraints, often interactive with a corporate sponsor. Students are challenged to design effective and efficient part manufacturing methods and complete production systems for commercial and industrial products. The common theme for students is mastering process and system design procedures that are applicable to any product in any industry. Graduates have been successful in manufacturing enterprises that produce virtually every type of product--literally, from spacecraft to foodstuffs. Dr. Wells also leads innovation teams in two engineering venues: product realization capstone projects and a unique multidisciplinary undergraduate discovery-learning course.
Dr. Wells’ active research lies in orthopedics, pharmaceutical manufacturing, micro-assembly, micro-machining, circuit board process engineering, and manufacturing engineering pedagogy. Through his research, Dr. Wells has supervised the completion of twelve graduate degrees in the past eight years. His publication history includes nearly seventy print publications and over forty invited presentations. He has addressed professional audiences in Ukraine, Japan, India, Brazil, Peru, Mexico and Canada, as well as in many United States venues. For many years, he has been active in the national leadership of Society of Manufacturing Engineers, American Society for Engineering Education, and ABET. Over the past twenty-nine years, he has been a central figure in the design, development and articulation of curricula for educating manufacturing engineers in the United States and in selected off-shore venues. He has also been an occasional contributor to Surface Mount Technology Association and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In 2010, Dr. Wells was honored with the Joseph A. Siegel International Service Award by SME. He has also received manufacturing educator awards from ASEE and been included in several Who’s Who publications.
Prior to joining NDSU, Dr. Wells held manufacturing engineering and management positions in energy, aerospace, commercial sheet metal and automotive industries for twenty-six years. He also held a faculty position at University of Cincinnati for fifteen years, including thirteen years as chair of a department of some five hundred students. He has also served as an academic dean in an experimental manufacturing engineering education program at Focus: HOPE (Detroit, Michigan) and as chair of the IME Department at NDSU. Dr. Wells is a Certified Manufacturing Engineer and earned the B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and the Ph.D. in Engineering Management from the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

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