GEOFFREY BOOTHROYD (1932-2024)

BY WINSTON A. KNIGHT
SUBMITTED BY THE NAE HOME SECRETARY

GEOFFREY BOOTHROYD passed away peacefully on Jan. 3, 2024, at the age of 91. He had a long and distinguished academic career that led to significant improvements in assembly methods and product design. He is best remembered for leading the development of procedures for the design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA) of products, which have been widely adopted across numerous industries. These methods resulted in substantial manufacturing cost savings and the simplification of product structures.

Geoff was born in Radcliffe, Manchester, England, on Nov. 18, 1932, the firstborn child of Arthur and Annie Boothroyd. His younger brother, Arthur, lives in San Diego, California. Geoff married Shirley Lewis in 1954 and was a devoted husband for 64 years until her passing in 2018. They had two daughters, Lynda Boothroyd and Janet Gilligan, along with two grandchildren and a great-grandson.

As a young boy, Geoff faced several challenges. His father passed away when he was young, and he was evacuated during the air raids of World War II. After returning to Manchester, he earned a place at Strand Grammar School. Upon graduating, he became an engineering apprentice at Mather and Platt and later became a design engineer at English Electric. During this time, he obtained an external degree in mechanical engineering from the University of London in 1956. The External Degree Program enabled full-time workers to obtain degrees by taking courses at various technical schools in the United Kingdom during evenings or day-release programs. For Geoff, this was at The Royal Technical College in Salford.

He then became a lecturer at the Royal Technical College, which later became Salford University, and carried out research on temperature distributions in metal machining. For this work, he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of London in 1962. His thesis involved novel methods of interpreting photographic images of the chip formation area to determine the temperature distributions. This was well before the advent of digital photography and thermal imaging cameras.

He continued his career at Salford, eventually becoming Reader in mechanical engineering. During this time, he developed a research program focused on automatic assembly and the feeding and orienting of parts. For this work, he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree from the University of London in 1972. In British universities, a D.Sc. is granted for a well-established research program in a specific field whose results have been widely published in respected journals and proceedings. The major universities award very few D.Sc. degrees — usually only one or two per year.

In 1965, he took sabbatical leave from Salford to serve as a visiting professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Following that, in 1967, he and his family moved to the United States, where he became a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. At UMass, he developed a research program in automatic assembly, which gradually expanded into design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA). Through this work, it became clear that reducing assembly costs was not better achieved by simplifying parts for easier feeding in automated systems, but by reducing the number of parts altogether and optimizing the manufacturing processes for each one. This insight formed the basis for design for assembly (DFA) analysis procedures.

In 1985, Geoff moved to the University of Rhode Island (URI), where he remained for the rest of his academic career, becoming an emeritus professor upon retirement. At URI, along with colleagues, he helped establish a primarily industry-funded research program on DFMA, based in the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department. The emphasis of this work was on developing analysis processes that could influence early design decisions related to a product’s physical structure and intended function, including the number of individual parts and the selection of materials and manufacturing processes. Industry sponsors of the research placed a strong emphasis on the availability of software implementations of the DFMA models, which led to the establishment of an offshoot company, Boothroyd Dewhurst Inc. Geoff served as managing director of the company. The DFMA software became widely adopted across a range of industries, leading to substantial improvements in product design, enhanced competitiveness, and reductions in manufacturing costs. In recognition of this impact, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President George H.W. Bush in 1991.

In 1979, Geoff was named a fellow of the International Academy for Production Engineering (CIRP). Within CIRP, he helped establish Scientific Committee A, which focused more attention on assembly methods, and he served as its first chair. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1989 for outstanding contributions to manufacturing engineering research and product design for manufacturing.

He published textbooks on metal cutting, automatic assembly, and DFMA, along with numerous papers in these three primary areas. He had a remarkable ability to recognize basic — and often simple — solutions to complex problems. This is well illustrated by the three straightforward criteria he established for determining the necessity of separate parts in a product, which form the basis for the DFA analysis. The insight seems so intuitive that it often leaves one thinking, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Throughout his academic career, he consistently demonstrated the ability to identify research problems relevant to industry, secure funding to support that work, and engage the expertise of colleagues, many of whom became lifelong friends.

Geoff was a devoted family man who cherished his role as a husband and father, balancing his professional achievements with a rich and rewarding personal life. His hobbies included model railway construction, tennis, golf, classical music appreciation, and watercolor painting.