MSU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering names Ed Luke 2025 Distinguished Alumnus

March 21, 2025

STARKVILLE, Miss.— A three-time Mississippi State University graduate has been chosen as the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Distinguished Alumni for 2025.

Edward A. Luke was honored at a luncheon on Friday, March 21, alongside faculty and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Advisory Board, where he received the Distinguished Alumni Award. This marks the fifth year the electrical and computer engineering department has recognized a group of distinguished alumni. Luke received a medallion, and his name will be permanently displayed in Simrall Hall.

The recently retired MSU computer science and engineering professor earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1987 from Mississippi State. Luke has had a distinguished career in academia and industry, focusing on parallel computing technology. His work has contributed to the successful proposal for the NSF Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulations. While working as a researcher at ERC, Luke, the founder of Loci Consulting Services LLC, earned both a master's and a doctoral degree from MSU's computational engineering program.

During his doctoral research, Luke developed the Loci framework for automatic parallelization and created a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver called CHEM, which models chemically reacting flows. Today, this software is widely used in the aerospace industry, as highlighted below:

The Loci/CHEM code is the primary production solver at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) for designing and analyzing rocket engines and systems. Currently, Loci codes account for about 30% of NASA Ames' supercomputing hours.

After the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, NASA MSFC extensively used the Loci/CHEM code to support the analysis and redesign efforts for the Space Shuttle's return to flight. This marked the first major production use of the software.

In 2011, during Space Shuttle Mission STS-134, Boeing used the Loci/CHEM code to estimate reentry heating performance for damaged heat shield tiles with a 24-hour turnaround. These timely simulations confirmed that the tile damage did not pose a significant risk to reentry.

The Loci/CHEM code is now extensively used by NASA MSFC and SpaceX to model Starship vehicle components, including launch pad water deluge systems and hot staging events, for pre-and post-test analysis and design tasks.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is online at www.ece.msstate.edu and can be found at Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin.

The Bagley College of Engineering is online at www.bagley.msstate.edu and can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube at @msuengineering.

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By Camille Carskadon