Timothy W. Simpson

Timothy Simpson is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. He holds affiliate appointments in Engineering Design and the College of Information Sciences & Technology. His research interests include product family design and platform-based product development, multidisciplinary design optimization, trade space exploration, and additive manufacturing. He has over 250 publications in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings and he is the lead editor on two books, Product Platform and Product Family Design: Methods & Applications (2005) and Advances in Product Family and Product Platform Design: Methods & Applications (2013). His research has been supported by a variety of federal and state agencies, including NSF, ONR, DARPA, EDA, and DCED, as well as numerous companies, ranging from startups to multi-national corporations. He has worked with over 30 different companies to apply his research methods to improve their product lines and product development practices, and he helped establish and manages the Product Platforms Group on LinkedIn.  

Simpson joined the faculty of the Pennsylvania State University in 1998. He obtained his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University in 1994 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1995 and 1998, respectively. He was a visiting researcher at the Multidisciplinary Optimization Branch of the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA; in the summer of 1997 and spent part of fall 2002 working in the Applied Mathematics and Statistics Group at The Boeing Company in Seattle, WA. He has received numerous awards for his teaching, research, and service, including the ASME Ben C. Sparks Medal (2014), the ASEE Fred Merryfield Award (2011), and the Penn State President’s Award for Excellence in Academic Integration (2007). He is the only faculty member to have won the Outstanding and Premier Awards for both Teaching and Research Awards from the Penn State Engineering Alumni Society. He is a Fellow of ASME and an Associate Fellow of AIAA. He is a Department Editor for IIE Transactions: Design & Manufacturing, and he serves on the editorial boards of Research in Engineering Design and Journal of Engineering Design.