AE alum leads new Systems Engineering Master's Degree Program

“We want to get engineers to consider total system thinking: the big picture instead of ‘I’ll just do my part and pass it on,’” explained Steven J. D’Urso, (BS 1978, MS 1989, Aerospace Engineering). An AE Alumni Board member, D'Urso has recently joined the Department of Aerospace Engineering faculty to administer the new Aerospace Systems Engineering (SE) master’s degree program that will begin this fall.

D’Urso brings 30 years of experience in St. Louis aerospace industries, having worked for both The Boeing Company and the McDonnell Douglas Company. In addition to his own experiences, D’Urso will teach the students lessons other aerospace engineers have learned throughout the past.

“Lessons of history will come up with all this operations context. I want to make this real,” he said, adding that this program is one of the first of its kind offered in U.S. universities.

Finishing the non-thesis curriculum in one year, students in the program will receive a good foundation in the methods and tools involved in defining and managing complex, multidisciplinary aerospace design projects.

“A lot of people think that design is an art, because there’s not one answer. (Systems engineering) takes the art part out and puts order to the chaos,” D’Urso maintains. “Design is not a process; design is a strategy. You use tools and processes that you have along the line that work.” Systems Engineering provides some of those tools and processes.

With the help of AE graduate student Drew Ahern, D’Urso plans to run the new master’s program as a mock professional experience for the students. “I will deal with the students as though I am an engineering manager in a company and they’re the engineers. They’ll have to give a report in the class. When they have completed the course, they’ll have to have some idea of what requirement analysis is. They will need to understand the theory behind why we are doing what we are doing and how to judge what’s a good requirement.”

Students entering the program this fall will produce a set of requirements for a large, complex aerospace system or space exploration system, then will write a systems engineering master plan to carry out the project. The students will work in integrated teams, with individuals performing pieces of the puzzle.

D’Urso earned his own master’s degree in aerospace engineering through a distance-learning program while he was working in St. Louis. He continued his relationship with the Department of Aerospace Engineering in the 1990s, working with Kenneth R. Sivier, now an emeritus associate professor, to teach a once-a-week lecture series to AE students.

Through the course and collaborating with Professor Sivier’s capstone design class, D’Urso assigned each student with the task of designing a multi-mission, tactical aircraft. The result was individual designs unique to each of the 70-some students. D’Urso took the students’ experiences back to his team in St. Louis as they considered real criteria and implementation for developing a multi-role air vehicle configuration design.

“Working with the U of I allowed us to do something that scope would not allow us to do ourselves,” D’Urso said. “We didn’t have the quickie tools and methods available – what we had was like driving a tack with a sledgehammer. (Our company) gained a lot of insight through our relationship with the department.”

Excited about the new program’s possibilities, D’Urso will share with the students his own real-life experiences gained by spending the past 11 years of his career as a systems engineer and systems engineering manager. He is an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a member and past director of the St. Louis Section of the International Council on Systems Engineering.

Students interested in enrolling in the new program can learn more online, or can contact D’Urso directly, (or Staci Tankersley, program coordinator for graduate programs in the AE department).
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Writer: Susan Mumm, editor, Department of Aerospace Engineering, 217/244-5382.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.