Two Honored with SAE International Elmer A. Sperry Award

WARRENDALE, Pa., July 10, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- SAE International presented two engineering professionals with the Elmer A. Sperry Award during the SAE 2012 World Congress held in Detroit.

This award, established in 1955, is given in recognition for Development and Implementation of Novel Methods and Tools for the Advancement of Dependability and Safety in Transportation. The award is named after Elmer A. Sperry, whose inventions and achievements in engineering have greatly influenced and benefited all forms of transportation.

Those receiving awards included:

• Zigmund Bluvband, President, ALD Group
• Herbert Hecht, Chief Engineer, SoHaR Incorporated

Founding the ALD Group in 1984, Dr. Bluvband has been serving as its president ever since. Under his leadership, ALD Group has become the world's biggest company in the areas of safety, reliability and quality for civil and military aviation, railway and energy. Dr. Bluvband has focused his scientific and professional interest on the development of novel techniques for safety assessment and management of failure critical aviation systems.

Dr. Bluvband received a master's degree in Radio-Electronics and his PhD from Polytechnic University of Lvov, USSR. He also holds a master's degree in Mathematics from Lvov State University.

Founding SoHaR Incorporated in 1978, Dr. Hecht served as president until 1995 when he assumed his current role of chief engineer. His career has been focused on the design and verification of reliability and safety critical systems. He has headed the certification of flight control systems for helicopters and light aircraft, and participated in the certification of the electric power system for the mostly electric Global Express.

Dr. Hecht, a Golden Core member of the IEEE Computer Society, is a registered control systems engineer in California. He received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from City College of New York, master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and a PhD in Engineering from UCLA.

SAE International is a global association of more than 133,000 engineers and related technical experts in the aerospace, automotive and commercial-vehicle industries. SAE International's core competencies 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™.

- www.sae.org -

Contact: Shawn Andreassi of SAE International, 1-724-772-8522 or [email protected]

SOURCE SAE International