Stein Receives Honors

Sound and Vibration, Dec 2004

Peter Stein, President of Stein Engineering Services, Inc. for 54 years and developer of the Unified Approach to the Engineering of Measurement Systems, has heen honored hy Arizona State University as Professor Emeritus of Engineering, more than 27 years after his resignation from their faculty. A Peter Stein Measurement Engineering Endowment Fund has also been established by the University to encourage students to enter the dynamic measurement field and to honor students who do.

Stein Engineering Services started in 1950 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from where Peter holds two B.S. degrees and an M.S. degree. He was Group Leader, Instrumentation Engineering for a small gas-turbine manufacturer in Phoenix, AZ for four years and was frustrated by the lack of preparation his education had provided for planning measurement systems, selecting transducers and instrumentation, organizing test procedures, and harvesting provably valid data.

Stein devoted his subsequent career developing the Unified Approach to Measurement Systems , the first rational, selfcontained and systematic approach to problems not discussed by the educational system. He specialized in presenting short courses in The Engineering and Dynamics of Measurement Systems for Test and Evaluation.

Concurrently, Stein was affiliated with universities for 23 years, 14 as full professor of engineering at Arizona State University in charge of a curriculum which produced B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. graduates in Measurement Systems Engineering in his Laboratory for Measurement Systems Engineering - Lf/MSE. He studied under Profs. William M. Murray and Kurt S. Lion at MIT.

Peter Stein is a Senior Member of IKEE, Fellow of the Instrument Society of America (ISA) and Fellow of the Society for Experimental Mechanics (SEM), honors awarded to him for the development of the Unified Approach to the Engineering of Measurement Systems, on which all of his lectures are based. He is a founding member of the Western Regional Strain Gage Committee, a member of the Old Guard of ASME, and was, for 24 years, a delegate and former Board Member of the National Conference of Standards Laboratories.

Stein was the editor-publisher of the journal Strain Gage Readings with a world-wide circulation of over 1000 which he also wrote, 1956-64. It was devoted exclusively to experimental stress analysis, primarily strain gages, and carried abstracts and summaries of over 3600 publications.

Stein has lectured and published widely. His major field is the electrical measurement of mechanical and thermal quantities by systematic and rational means. He has twice received the Frocht Educator Award from SEM, the Eckman Educator Award from ISA, and the Faculty Achievement Award from Arizona State University (ASU). In 1988 he received SEM's Tatnall Award for Service to the Society.

Peter has been Visiting Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, of Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany and of Civil Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark. He has been an Exchange Scientist between the U.S. and Polish National Academies of Sciences.

Stein has given his Measurement Systems Engineering Short Course over 300 times in 28 states in the U.S. and in 17 other countries on 4 continents, sponsored by over 70 organizations covering the spectrum of governmental, industrial and educational institutions. He was the moving force and organizer behind the Jubilee Celebrations: Fifty Years Since the Commercialization of Strain Gages/ Load Cells/Brittle Coatings in 1988, 1989 and the Sixty-Years of Bonded Resistance Strain Gages celebrations in 1996.

Peter Stein wrote and published the Lf/ MSE Newsletter which united the 960 students who passed through his courses in Lf/MSE at ASU between Fall 1959 and Spring 1977. This Newsletter was issued twice a year for 25 years.

To contribute to the Measurement Engineering Endowment, inquire at: meas. sys@alum.mit.edu.