The Benjamin Dasher Award is given each year to the best paper and presentation at the annual Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference.
Benjamin Dasher Award Selection Process
Each year the best paper/presentation combination at the FIE meeting is selected to receive the Ben Dasher Award. Papers are nominated for the award by reviewers. A committee with representation from each of the organizing societies (ASEE ERM, IEEE Education Society, and IEEE Computer Society) is formed to review nominated papers. During the FIE meeting, the committee attends presentations of the nominated papers. The committee then makes a final recommendation to the FIE Planning Committee for the Benjamin Dasher Award winner based on the overall quality of both the paper and the presentation. The winning author(s) are announced at the following year’s FIE meeting.
Benjamin J. Dasher was born December 27, 1912 in Macon, GA. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in electrical engineering in 1935 and 1945, respectively, and graduated with a doctorate in electrical engineering in 1952 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At MIT, Dr. Dasher worked on the electronics of instrumentation of electromechanical transducers and analog-to-digital converters. He was the author of “Dasher’s Method” for the synthesis of resistance-capacitance two-port networks, which is found in standard textbook treatments.
While at Georgia Tech, Dr. Dasher served as a graduate assistant in 1936, then as an instructor in 1940. He became an assistant professor in 1945. While earning his PhD at MIT, he was an instructor from 1948-51. Before finishing with his PhD, he became an associate professor at Georgia Tech in 1951, was promoted to professor in 1952, and became director of the School of Electrical Engineering in 1954 serving in that capacity until 1969. In 968, Dr. Dasher was appointed associate dean of the College of Engineering.
At Georgia Tech, Dr. Dasher served as director of network synthesis projects and transistor oscillator projects. His fields of interest included advanced network theory, electronic theory, electronic circuits, electrical engineering education, machine translation, speech analysis, and pattern recognition. He was credited for bringing undergraduate engineering education to the forefront at Georgia Tech and for increasing interactions between undergraduates and industry.
Dr. Dasher was a member of Phi Kappa Phi, ASEE, Sigma Xi, and the American Association of University Professors; he was a Fellow of both the IEEE and the Institute of Radio Engineers. He served as a regional director for IEEE and as the chair for the Atlanta section of IEEE; he was on numerous committees for IRE, AIEE, and IEEE. He served as President of the IEEE Education Group in 1970-71.
Ben Dasher organized the first Frontiers in Education conference held in Atlanta in 1971 with 100 participants. There were 34 papers in six technical sessions. Dr. Dasher died of congestive heart failure on December 13, 1971 in Houston, Texas. The Benjamin J. Dasher Award for the Best Paper at the FIE Conference each year recognizes his contributions as the founder of the Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE).
*Contributed by James R. Rowland from materials research by Jackie Nemeth at Georgia Tech. *Information above provided by Wally Venable, Ed Jones, Jim Stice, and John Lindenlaub.
