Benjamin J. Dasher was born December 27, 1912 in Macon, GA. He earned his Bacehlor’s and Master’s degrees in electrical engineering in 1935 and 1945, respectively, and graudated witha doctorate in electrical enginering in 1952 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, Dr. Dasher worked on the electronics of instrumentation of electromechanical transducers and analog-todigital converters. He was the author of “Dasher’s Method” for sysnthesis of resistance-capacitance two-port networks, which is found in standard textbook treatments.
While at Georgia Tech, Dr. Dasher served as a graduate assistant in 1936, then as an instructor in 1940. He became an assistant professor in 1945. While earning his PhD at MIT, he was an instructor from 1948-51. Before finishing with his PhD, he became an associate professor at Georgia Tech in 1951, was promoted to professor in 1952, and became director fo the School of Electrical Engineering in 1954 serving in that capacity until 1969. In 968, Dr. Dasher was appointed associate dean in the College of Engineering.
At Georgia Tech, Dr. Dasher served as director of network sysnthesis projects and transistor oscillator projects. His fields of interest included advanced network theory, electronic theory, electronic circuits, electrical engineering education, machine translation, speech analysis,a nd pattern recognition. He was credited for bringing undergraduate engineering education to the forefront at Georgia Tech and for increasing interactions between undergrdautes and industry.
Dr. Dasher was a member of Phi Kappa Phi, ASEE, Sigma Xi, and the American Association of Unvesity Professors; he was a Fellow of both the IEEE and the Institute of Radio Engineers. He served as a regional director for IEEE and as the chair for the Atlanta section of IEEE; he was on numerous committees for IRE, AIEE, and IEEE. He served as President of the IEEE Education Group in 1970-71.
Ben Dasher organized the first Frontiers in Education confdrence held in Atlanata in 1971 with 100 participants. There were 34 papers in six technical sessions. Dr. Dasher died of congestive heart failure on December 13, 1971 in Houston, Texas. The Benjamin J. Dasher award for the Best Paper at the FIE Conference each year recongizes his contributions as the founder of the Frontiers in Education Conference.
Contributed by James R. Rowland from materiasl research by Jackie Nemeth at Georgia Tech.
Information above provided by Wally Venable, Ed Jones, Jim Stice, and John Lindenlaub.