Department of Mechanical Engineering

Judy Vance

Professor

Virtual Reality Applications Center
2624B Howe Hall
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011
Tel. 515-294-9474
Fax. 515-294-5530
e-mail: jmvance@iastate.edu

Education
Iowa State University, B.S., Mechanical Engineering, 1980
Iowa State University, M.S., Mechanical Engineering, 1987
Iowa State University, Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, 1992

Areas of Interest
Virtual Reality applications in mechanical engineering including virtual assembly, virtual manufacturing and mechanism synthesis; optimization; fundamentals of engineering design including design ideation and concept generation. 

Links
Dr. Vance is a faculty associate of the Virtual Reality Applications Center. More information about her research and teaching activities can be found at this website: http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/~jmvance.

Biosketch
Dr. Vance is a professor of mechanical engineering and a faculty associate of the Virtual Reality Applications Center. In 2007 and 2008, she was the program director for Engineering Design and Innovation at the National Science Foundation (NSF). From 2004 to 2006, she served on NSF’s Engineering Directorate Advisory Board. At Iowa State University, she chaired the mechanical engineering department and served as director of graduate programs.

Dr. Vance is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and a past associate editor of the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design. For the ASME Design Automation Technical Committee, she served as the international program chair, technical program chair, conference chair (2000 ASME Design Automation Conference), and committee chair. She is the past chair of the ASME Design Engineering Division (DED) Executive Committee, after holding positions of chair, secretary, technical committee executive, and vice chair/treasurer. The DED is the largest technical division within ASME with more than 13,000 members and has organizational and financial responsibility for the annual ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences.

Dr. Vance actively supports increased diversity in engineering, especially related to the participation of women. She is active in the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), having served as faculty advisor for the Iowa State student SWE section and as a member of the National Nominating Committee. She was also one of the charter members leading the reactivation of the local SWE professional section. She is past president of the Women in Engineering Leadership Institute (WELI). This organization’s activities, funded by NSF, promoted training, networking and leadership opportunities for senior women engineering faculty across the nation. As principal investigator of the NSF/WELI grant, she led a group of researchers from five universities in organizing seven academic leadership workshops for women engineering faculty over the span of three years. Participants from 124 institutions representing 39 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, New Zealand and Canada attended these workshops.

Dr. Vance’s research focuses on investigating applications of virtual reality techniques to engineering design. This research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and several industry partners including Deere & Co., P&G, General Motors, Boeing, Rockwell International, and Ford Motor Company. Vance received the NSF CAREER award for her research on using virtual reality to facilitate interactive design based on shape changes and finite element analysis. She is also the recipient of the Mechanical Engineering Teacher of the Year award and the College of Engineering’s Superior Teacher award.

Selected Publications

  • A. Seth, H. Su, and J. M. Vance, “Development of a dual-handed haptic assembly system: SHARP,” ASME Journal of Computing and Information Sciences in Engineering, 8(4), 2008, 044502.
  • T. J. Duncan and J. M. Vance, “Interactive interrogation of computational mixing data in a virtual environment,” ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, 129 (3), 2007, pp. 361-367.
  • B. M. Howard and J. M. Vance, “Desktop haptic virtual assembly using physically-based modeling,” Virtual Reality, 11 (4), 2007, pp. 207-215.
  • K. A. Chipperfield, J. M. Vance, and A. G. Fischer, “Fast Meshless Reanalysis Using Combined Approximations, Pre-Conditioned Conjugate Gradient, and Taylor Series,” AIAA Journal, 44:66, 2006, pp. 1325-1331.
  • C-E. Kim and J. M. Vance, “Collision Detection and Part Interaction Modeling to Facilitate Immersive Virtual Reality Assembly Methods,” ASME Journal of Computing and Information Sciences in Engineering, 4 (2), 2004, pp. 83 - 90.
  • J. Kelsick, J. M. Vance, L. Buhr and C. Moeller, "Discrete event simulation implemented in a virtual environment," ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, 125 (3), 2003, pp. 428-433
  • P. M. Larochelle, J. M. Vance, and J. Kihonge, "Interactive Visualization of the Line Congruences Associated with Four Finite Spatial Poses for Spatial Mechanism Design," ASME Journal of Computing and Information Sciences in Engineering, 2 (3), 2002, pp. 208-215.