William R.D. Wilson, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Center for Surface Engineering and Tribology at Northwestern University, has been named the first James N. and Nancy J. Farley Professor of Manufacturing and Entrepreneurship, effective Sept. 1. A faculty member at Northwestern since 1981, Wilson is internationally known for his research on the tribology of metal forming processes.
Tribology is the study of interacting surfaces in relative motion.
Wilson was a Senior Research Scientist at Battelle for four years before joining the faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was the co-author of a paper on sheet metal forming processes which won the American Society of Mechanical Engineer's Blackall Award in 1996. He is a Fellow of ASME and of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. The James N. and Nancy J. Farley Professorship was endowed by James Farley and his wife Nancy. Farley is the chairman and chief executive officer of SpeedFam International, a holding company whose subsidiaries design, engineer and manufacture equipment that performs specialized surface processing used mostly for semiconductor and memory disk production.