Sep. 4th, 2012, Prof. William M Banks
Publishing Time:2012-09-04

Biography
Professor  Banks is currently the Emeritus Professor of Advanced Materials in the  Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Strathclyde  and a Past President of the IMechE (2008-2009). He has served on and  chaired a large number of its committees including the Trustee Board,  Council and the Trustee Board Awards Committee (currently Chairman). He  has also chaired a few specialist committees including the Schools and  Students Working Group where the objective was to interest young people  in engineering. He is also Editor–in-Chief of one of its Proceedings  Journals. Professor Banks is a past Chairman of the Engineering  Professors’ Council (EPC). He is only the second Scot to have held this  post. During his time as Chairman he became well known nationally for  his championing of many quality causes and in particular for putting EPC  on the Government’s agenda and keeping engineering education in the  appropriate public domain.
His  research work has spanned composite structures technology to seminal  work on the NDE of adhesively bonded joints using dielectric  spectroscopy. He developed the composites research from scratch in his  department at Strathclyde to a position in which Strathclyde is now  recognized as a Centre of Excellence in this field internationally. A  total of around 200 papers have been published.  He has also acted as a  consultant to many companies and formerly transferred his wide ranging  research findings through the Directorship of the Centre for Advanced  Structural Materials (CASM) and the Scottish Polymer Technology Network  (SPTN).
Topic of Invited talk
The Design of Composite Structures: Some Basic Principles and Example Application and Research.