Ali Seireg dies; past senior VP, Council on Engineering

Prof. Emeritus Ali A. Seireg, who was a past senior vice president of the Council on Engineering, died Sept. 3. He was 74.

Seireg was born in Mehalla, Egypt, and came to the United States to pursue his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. He lectured at Cairo University from 1954-56, then joined the Falk Corp. in Milwaukee as an advisory engineer in 1956 and was a consultant from 1960 until 1996.

He became a professor of theoretical and applied mechanics at Marquette University from 1960-65 and joined the professorial faculty at the University of Wisconsin in 1965. Seireg was a biomechanics consultant for the Veterans Administration Research Center and served as a consultant to the NASA Technology Application Team, the U.S. Navy, U.S. State Department and the National Science Foundation.

Since 1986, he was the Ebaugh chaired professor in mechanical engineering at the University of Florida and held the Kaiser chair at the University of Wisconsin.
During his lifetime, Seireg published seven books and 300 archival papers. He was president of the Gear Research Institute from 1983-93, and the founding editor of the ASME Hybrid Journal on Computers in Mechanical Engineering: CIME. He held several patents and copyrights.

Supervising more than 300 M.S. and Ph.D. dissertations, he received the George Westinghouse Award from the American Society for Engineering Education in 1970, the Richards Memorial Award of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1973 and the E.P. Connel Award of the American Gear Manufacturing Association in 1974. He was also a visiting distinguished lecturer at North Carolina State University in 1975, at Penn State University in 1976 and at New Jersey Institute of Technology in 1983.

In 1987, Seireg received the Limonosov Medal from the USSR Academy of Sciences and an honorary membership in the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society; in 1988, the Kuwait Prize for Science; in 1989, a Foreign Member of the USSR Academy of Science; in 1990, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Design Automation Award; and in 2000, a Foreign Member of the Yugoslav Academy of Engineering.

He created a "walking machine" for paraplegics. It is a permanent exhibit in the Wellcome Museum of the History of Medicine, Science Museum, in London.

As founding editor of SOMA, "Engineering for the Human Body," he served on the editorial board of international journals and was editor of the Wiley Series on Engineering Design.

The family has established an Ali Seireg Memorial Fund for the University of Wisconsin Cancer Research Center. The address is 600 Highland Ave., Room K-4-658, Madison, WI 53792-6164.

He is survived by his wife, Shirley Marachowsky of Portage, whom he met while the two were students at the University of Wisconsin; their daughters, Mirette, of Okinawa, Japan, and Pamela of Oak Brook, Ill., and two granddaughters.

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