Louis Bucciarelli received his B.S. from Cornell University (Mechanical Engineering, 1959) an M.Aero.E from the same institution (1960) and his Ph.D. from MIT (Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1966). He was Director of MIT’s Technology Studies Program, and has been a Curator of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian, held various visiting appointments at the University of Sussex, at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (Ecole des Mines, Paris), at Delft Technical University, at Denmark’s Institute of Technology, and Cambridge. He has received the Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, has consulted for a wide range of industries, and has helped lead a coalition of engineering schools (ECSEL) in the renovation of undergraduate education.
He is the author of Sophie Germain: an Essay in the History of the Theory of Elasticity (with N. Dworsky, Reidel, 1980); Designing Engineers (MIT Press, 1994); Engineering Philosophy (Delft Univ. Press, IOS Press, 2003); Coulomb’s Memoirs on Torsion, Electricity, and Magnetism (with Andre Koch Torres Assis, Apeiron, Montreal, 2023) and an engineering textbook, Engineering Mechanics for Structures (Dover, 2008).