William R. Wessels

Bill Wessels is a reliability engineer who serves as a Principal Research Scientist in the Reliability & Failure Analysis Lab of UAHuntsville, and teaches reliability engineering on the faculty of the UAH Industrial & Systems Engineering Department. He earned his doctoral degree in Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 1996. He earned his Bachelor’s of Science in Engineering from the United States Military Academy in 1970. Dr. Wessels research in failure mechanisms that form the basis for design-for-reliability and reliability-centered maintenance began in the mining industry in 1975 and continued with Space Station Freedom and US Army missile and aviation programs. He is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and Society of Reliability Engineers. He is a Registered Professional Engineer in Mechanical Engineering in Pennsylvania. Bill and his wife, Tudor, live on a small farm with seven dogs, ever changing numbers of horses, donkeys, goats, geese, turkeys, chickens, and who knows how many barn cats. The beasts ignore the findings of statistically rigorous algorithms, defy any statistical level of significance, behave in a random walk manner, and ridicule his expertise in analytical methods applied to them. Tudor finds any attempt to predict their behavior to be a lack of common sense and a waste of time. But I continue to try.