Patrick O'Connor, Stevenage, UK
Since 1995 Patrick O'Connor has worked as an independent consultant on engineering management, reliability, quality and safety. He received his engineering training at the Royal Air Force Technical College and served for 16 years in the RAF Engineer Branch, including tours on aircraft maintenance and in the Reliability and Maintainability office of the Ministry of Defence (Air). He was appointed Reliability Manager of British Aerospace Dynamics in 1980 and joined British Rail Research as Reliability Manager in 1993. Mr. O'Connor is the author of Practical Reliability Engineering, published by John Wiley (4th. edition 2002). He is also the author of the chapter on reliability and quality engineering in the Academic Press Encyclopaedia of Physical Science and Technology, and until 1999 was the UK editor of the Wiley journal Quality and Reliability Engineering International. He has written many papers and articles on quality and reliability engineering and management, and he lectures at universities and other venues on these subjects. He is editor of the Wiley book series in quality and reliability engineering.
Andre Kleyner, Delphi Electronics & Safety, USA
Andre Kleyner has over 25 years of engineering, research, consulting, and managerial experience specializing in reliability of electronic and mechanical systems designed to operate in severe environments. He received the doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from University of Maryland, and Master of Business Administration from Ball State University. Dr. Kleyner is a Global Reliability Engineering Leader with Delphi Electronics & Safety, and an adjunct professor at Purdue University. Andre developed and taught many training courses for reliability, quality, and design professionals. He also holds several US and foreign patents and authored professional publications on reliability, quality, and other engineering topics. Andre has is a senior member of American Society for Quality, Certified Reliability and Quality Engineer and Six-sigma black belt. He holds several US and foreign patents and hs authored many papers on the topics of warranty, lifecycle cost, reliability, and statistics. His areas of expertise are: Design for Reliability (DfR); Reliability of Electronic and Mechanical Systems; Product Test and Validation Planning; Physics of Failure; Warranty Management; Reliability Prediction and Warranty Forecasting; Weibull Analysis; Monte Carlo Simulation; Systems Engineering; Dependability analysis, and testing of energy systems for power electronics and electric/hybrid vehicles, and Training and consulting in these areas.