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David Alan Dornfeld

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ134889620 ↗
Source-derived summary

David Alan Dornfeld was a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, California from 1977 until his death in 2016. From 2010 until 2015, Dornfeld served as chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department. At the time of his death, he was the founding director of the campus’s Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation.

Education

Dornfeld received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1972, 1973 and 1976, respectively. His PhD dissertation, “Investigation of the Fundamentals of Mechanical Pulping”, addressed the use of abrasive machining in production engineering. He was the 29th of the 114 students to get their PhD under Professor Wu.

After a year of teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in 1977 he joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. At Cal, he became the Will C. Hall Family Professor of Engineering and the Director of the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability (LMAS). He mentored 55 PhD students and consulted and advised countless other graduate students during his time at Berkeley.

Career highlights

Source:

1982 - Received the SME (Society of Manufacturing Engineers) Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award.

Editorial summary

“David Alan Dornfeld” enters the record as open-knowledge reference entry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what David, Alan and Dornfeld can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1977, 2016, 2010, 2015—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1948-08-03. Its strongest next move is a source search built around David, Alan and Dornfeld.
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“David Alan Dornfeld” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, David, Alan and Dornfeld provides the most credible route into that argument.

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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q134889620. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1977, 2016, 2010 and 2015.

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This entry incorporates text from “David Alan Dornfeld” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.