Dr. Lawrence Zavodney, is presently a professor of
mechanical engineering and chairman of the Elmer W. Engstrom Department of
Engineering at Cedarville University, where he have been serving as the
department’s first chairman since 1992.
He is married to Deborah Jo Sinea; they have seven children.
Dr. Zavodney started at Bath Elementary School in the 3rd grade. He attended Eastview Junior High and Revere Senior High School, graduating in 1969. “I struggled with stuttering, was a late bloomer, really didn’t like to read, in the 8th grade got an “F” in English but an “A” in spelling, earned average grades, did not take the college prep track, and was told that there was not enough room in the 9th grade biology class for me.” However, he did excel in the drafting class in 9th grade, so much so that Mr. Baker let him take the senior drawing class in 10th grade, the first sophomore to ever do that. He also excelled in Mr. Meyer’s and Mr. Baker’s shop classes. However, Mr. Pamer, the math and physics teacher, had special classes after school, and he was one of three selected to participate. He also enjoyed building science fair projects. “When it came time to graduate, the guidance counselor pointed out my strengths, and actually discouraged me from going to college, suggesting that I would not do well. With my average grades and class rank in the bottom half of 202 classmates, my prospects for a successful career in college were not very good.” While in high school, he attended Ghent Christian Church. One of his classmates—Janet Swenson—invited him to attend The Chapel on Fir Hill to hear Dr. David Burnham speak. “It was there that I renewed my commitment to follow Jesus Christ as my personal Savior.”
His parents really wanted their kids to go to college so he went to Akron U. “I got a D in my first real engineering class: Engineering Mechanics I—Statics. Working my way through college, I eventually learned the discipline of how to study by the time I was a junior, and graduated with the Outstanding Senior Award.” He represented Akron U. at the regional (OH, WV, MI, western PA, and ONTARIO) American Society of Mechanical Engineers student conference, and was runner up for national competition. Besides graduating from a five-year engineering program, he also went through the ROTC program and received a commission in the USAF as a 2nd lieutenant. While he was a student at Akron, he served as president of IVCF, a non-denominational college Christian fellowship.
Three professors asked him to stay on and do graduate research for them. He chose to work with a professor developing new non-invasive techniques to diagnose knee joint cartilage damage by analyzing the sounds that come from the joint during articulation. After graduating with his M.S.M.E. degree, fulfilling his military commitment, and working two years as a senior engineer with Babcock and Wilcox Research and Development Division in Alliance, OH, he went back to graduate school to pursue his Ph.D. MIT offered him a full-ride graduate research assistantship, but he took a faculty position at Virginia Tech instead.
One year later he went to Jordan for two years, helping that country develop a new engineering program. When he and his wife first drove from Holland to Jordan, they spent the night of September 11, 1980, in Ankara, the capitol of Turkey. While they slept, the army overthrew the government in a coup, sealed the borders, and imposed marshal law and a 24-hour curfew. His wife and he were in Jordan at the time (1980-1982) when the hostages were in Iran, the Iran/Iraq war started, Israel bombed the nuclear reactor in Iraq and invaded Lebanon to get rid of the PLO. Also, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was assassinated, and they had tanks in their backyard in defensive positions to repel a threatened invasion from Syria. After he returned to Virginia Tech and completed his studies, he accepted a faculty position in the Engineering Mechanics Department at The Ohio State University. In 1992, he was invited to chair a new engineering department at Cedarville University. Visit the engineering department web site http://cedarville.edu/dept/eg/ and see what has been happening.
He was invited by the editor of the journal Nonlinear Dynamics to write the first paper in the premier edition, and as a result, one of the fractal basins of attraction that he published in that paper (which came from his Ph.D. dissertation) was chosen as the cover logo for the journal. He found out later that the publisher was planning on using the very famous Lorenz Attractor, named after the MIT professor who first discovered chaos. In 1998 he was honored as the faculty scholar of the year at Cedarville University and in 2000 he was inducted into Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society, by the University of Akron. “And now, in 2002, I am honored to be inducted in the RHS Alumni Hall of Fame by my first alma mater.”
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