UMaine’s Dagher Named Chamber of Commerce Award Winner
ORONO, Maine – The Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce announced Monday that Habib Dagher, the founding director of the University of Maine’s AEWC Advanced Structures and Composites Center, has been named the winner of the chamber’s Catherine Lebowitz Award for Public Service.
Dagher will receive the award, which is given to an individual from the public sector who has advanced the cause of economic opportunity in the Bangor region, during the chamber’s annual awards dinner and ceremony on Jan. 19, 2012 at the Bangor Civic Center.
Dagher is a professor of civil/structural engineering at UMaine and Bath Iron Works professor of structural engineering.
Established by the National Science Foundation in 1996, the AEWC Advanced Structures and Composites Center is a world leader in the development of cost-effective, high performance hybrid composite materials for construction applications. Under Dagher’s leadership, the center has grown from 4 to 40 associated faculty and full-time staff in 10 years and annually employs more than 100 graduate and undergraduate students from an interdisciplinary mix of academic departments.
The center does contract research for private companies worldwide, as well as U.S. government agencies, generating nearly $10 million in external annual research and development funding. Recently, AEWC received $15 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy for the formation of the DeepCwind Consortium for the development of offshore wind energy off Maine’s coast.
In addition to AEWC’s research program developing offshore wind technologies, the center will open the Offshore Wind Lab in 2012. This lab provides Maine with a unique facility for designing, manufacturing and testing of components for the wind industry.
Contact: Habib Dagher, (207) 581-2138; hd@umit.maine.edu