Dr. Raymond B. Landis is currently the Dean of Engineering and Technology at California State University, Los Angeles, a position he assumed in August, 1985.

Dr. Landis received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. degree in Engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles. For five years, he worked as a Member of the Technical Staff at Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International in Canoga Park, California.

In 1967, Dr. Landis joined the faculty of the School of Engineering and Computer Science at California State University, Northridge where he remained until 1985. His technical areas of specialty are hear transfer, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and numerical analysis. He is a former chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at CSU Northridge.

Dr. Landis is a nationally recognized expert in minority student education. He has initiated and directed a number of programs which work with underrepresented minority students at both the precollege and university levels.

In 1973, he founded the first Minority Engineering Program (MEP) in California at CSU Northridge and served as its director for ten years. During this period, Dr. Landis served as academic advisor and mentor to over 800 minority engineering students. In order to involve other faculty, he initiated the Faculty Advisors for Minority Engineering Students (FAMES) program to train faculty to be effective as teachers, academic advisors, mentors, and role models to ethnic students. FGAMES has been replicated on seven CSU campuses involving faculty from many academic disciplines.

Dr. Landis was a leader in an initiative to establish MEPs at other California universities. During 1983/84, he served as Director of University Programs for the Statewide MESA Organization at UC Berkeley. Currently, twenty California engineering colleges operate MEPs based on his "community building/collaborative learning" model.

As CSU Northridge, Dr. Landis also initiated and directed four precollege program: Upward Bound; Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA); NSF Research Apprenticeships for Minority High School Students (RAMHSS); and the DOE Prefreshman Engineering Program (PREP).

Dr. Landis is widely published and a frequent speaker on minority engineering education. He edited the NACME/NAMEPA Handbook on Improving the Retention and Graduation of Minorities in Engineering which documents the MEP model. He authored a widely distributed monograph for students titled "Academic Gamesmanship: Becoming a 'Master' Engineering Student." His NACME monograph titled "Retention by Design: Achieving Excellence in Minority Engineering Education" provides a blueprint for effective approaches for improving minority engineering student academic success.

Dr. Landis has been actively involved in the dissemination of these approaches. He has served as a technical consultant to over forty universities, assisting them with the development of their MEPs. Over 400 engineering faculty and MEP staff have attended his three-day NSF Chautauqua Short Course titled "Achieving Excellence in Minority Engineering Education" over the past five years. In 1992, he traveled to South Africa under the sponsorship of the United States Information Agency to lecture and conduct workshops on successful approaches to minority engineering education.

Dr. Landis recently completed work on an NSD Curriculum Development grant "Improving student Success through a Model 'Introduction to Engineering' Course." An outgrowth of this grant is his new text "Studying Engineering: A Road Map to a Rewarding Career." The text is widely used across the nation in Introduction to Engineering courses that have a focus on student development.

Dr. Landis is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Vincent Bendix Minorities in Engineering Award and the Dow Outstanding Young Faculty Award of the American Society for Engineering Education and the Reginald H. Jones Award of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering. He is a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education, served for the past four years on the Executive Board of the ASSEE Engineering Dean's Council, and recently received the ASEE Centennial Medallion for "extraordinary leadership and service in engineering education."

Return to Faculty Page