Orlando Memory

Topic: GENESYS, Graduate Engineering Education System

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Research scientist Dr. Benjamin Patz came to Cape Canaveral to teach GENESYS, Graduate Engineering Education System in the 1960s. Dr. Patz describes the state of the art system funded by the Florida legislature using technology to connect students and faculty live from different sites for the purpose of engineering education. 

In the GENESYS Program at the Cape his students were people working at Martin Marietta and NASA. Dr. Patz says, “They had interesting problems they would discuss with you… It was a good chance to go over control systems, electromagnetic fields, the boundary value problems.”

In this excerpt (8:22) from an oral history interview on October 31, 2011 Dr. Patz discusses the GENESYS program and recalls an extremely rewarding period when he worked in the RATS Department, Research and Advanced Technology Systems at Martin Marietta in Middle River on gas discharge phenomena prior to coming to work at Martin Marietta in Orlando.

Dr. Benjamin Patz’s scientific contributions in the Central Florida area include working in the GENESYS Program at Cape Canaveral, Lockheed Martin, teaching at the Naval Training Equipment Center, Rollins College, and the University of Central Florida. His students from the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at UCF recall Professor Patz as a patient teacher who spent diligent time with everyone, undergraduate or graduate.