BIO

James L. Milton is a native of Gadsden County, FL.  He launched his higher education at Florida A & M University, Tallahassee.  He earned a B.S.M.E. from Howard University (Washington, D. C.) and a Ph. D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst).  He joined the renowned Bell Laboratories in 1972, in Columbus, OH providing telecommunications R&D for AT&T.  During that time frame, a paradigm shift was transforming the electronics packaging industry from discrete components to integrated circuits mounted on printed circuit boards.  Junction temperature had to be maintained below critical thresholds for system reliability.  Additionally, many complex mathematically intractable problems governing physical phenomena, could not be solved analytically.  But they could be solved numerically with computers, using finite-element method, FEM, techniques.  The writer co-sponsored one of Bell Laboratories' early FEM Symposiums changing the design paradigm. He served as Chairperson of the 100-member Central Ohio Section of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, ASME; completed two Executive Programs:  Corporate Strategy at MIT and Managing the Information Services Resource at Harvard; and served as a member of the Industrial Advisory Board for Mechanical Engineering Departments at The OSU (Columbus, OH) and FAMU/FSU (Tallahassee, FL).   He also served as a Technical Reviewer for the National Science Foundation, Transaction of the ASME Journal of Heat Transfer, and the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering.  He migrated to NJ to head a Design Engineering Department.  Later during Trivestiture, he transferred to AT&T to separate Bell Laboratories facilities in NJ into three independent companies:  AT&T, Lucent/Bell Labs, and NCR.  He retired in 2000, following an exciting 27.5-year career.  Milton relocated from NJ to FL in 2011 and continued enjoying several hobbies:  traveling/cruising, fishing, selective volunteering, and stock market dabbling. He and his wife Martha reside in the Tampa Bay area.