New Faculty
Dr. Geoff Rideout
Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science
Dr. Geoff Rideout graduated from Memorial's mechanical engineering program in 1993. After graduation, he worked at Northern Telecom as a manufacturing process engineer in Ottawa, at MCW Consultants in Toronto as a building systems designer, and at DY4 Systems in Ottawa as a research engineer modelling forced convection cooling of rugged-environment computer hardware.
Dr. Rideout then completed a master's in applied science at Queen's University in 1998. His research area was experimental testing and mathematical modelling of automobile suspension components. Doctoral work followed at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, in the area of modelling and simulation of dynamic systems with applications to military vehicle systems.
"Vehicle design using computer simulations is extremely difficult if the simulation models are not as simple as possible," noted Dr. Rideout. "When you go over a bump, your entire car bounces upward, the chassis vibrates, and the transmission and engine will also react. Designing a car by simulating all these system interactions all the time would take too long even on the fastest computer. I wanted to determine what interactions and couplings could be eliminated, depending on what you want to study."
After completing his PhD, Dr. Rideout worked as a post-doctoral fellow and lecturer at the University of Michigan's Automated Modeling Laboratory. Finally, he taught in the Mechanical Engineering Technology program at Humber College in Toronto before joining Memorial's faculty in January.
Dr. Rideout said he looks forward to establishing a research program to study issues in automated model generation and simplification, with applications to interdisciplinary areas such as robotic, land, and sea vehicles.