Madison, WisconsinㅡOctober 22, 2024ㅡDr. Peter Kelly Senecal, Co-Founder of Convergent Science, was awarded the ASME Dedicated Service Award at the 2024 ICE Forward conference. Since 1983, the Dedicated Service Award has honored unusual dedicated service to the Society, shown through outstanding performance and demonstrated leadership, in addition to prolonged and committed devotion, enthusiasm, and loyalty. Senecal was nominated for this distinction by the Technical & Engineering Communities sector for his decade-long service.
Senecal exemplifies exceptional commitment to ASME through his various leadership roles and initiatives over more than a decade. As recipient of the 2019 ASME ICE Award, he has made invaluable contributions to the internal combustion engine (ICE) community. His award-winning book, Racing Toward Zero: The Untold Story of Driving Green, contends that despite the popularity and governmental support behind electric vehicles, there's still plenty of life ahead for ICE and hybrid vehicles. In episode 80 on ASME's podcast, Senecal describes how ICEs have and will continue to power cars and trucks in the past, present, and future. In 2022, he took on the pivotal role of ASME ICE Forward Conference Chair and is now serving as the Chair of ASME's ICE Division. In addition to being an ASME Fellow, Senecal founded the webinar series, "The Future of the Internal Combustion Engine," a visionary effort to foster discussions and communications among leaders in the field. His dedication to inclusivity is evident in his initiation of the Women in ICE (WICE) committee. Throughout his tenure at ASME, Senecal has given countless keynotes and panel presentations, which continue to inspire and engage his audience, solidifying his continued status as a prominent figure in the transportation sector.
Senecal is a co-founder, owner, and vice president of Convergent Science, a leading computational fluid dynamics (CFD) company that develops and supports CONVERGE CFD software. Today, CONVERGE is extensively used by industries, governmental agencies, and academic institutions around the world to model not only ICEs, but many other applications, including electric motors, gas turbines, aftertreatment systems, rocket engines, and much more.
Senecal is the Co-Founder and Director of the Computational Chemistry Consortium (C3), which brings together industry, government, and academia to create a comprehensive and detailed repository for fuel combustion chemistry.
Believing innovation and education go hand in hand, Senecal is deeply committed to both research and teaching. He is a visiting professor at the University of Oxford and an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"It is a great joy to receive the ASME Dedicated Service Award," says Senecal. "And it brings me even greater joy to have been connected to ASME since my graduate school years. Since then, ASME has fostered equity in engineering and advanced engineering solutions that lead to a more sustainable world. It is a great honor to have been a part of that transformative journey, and I look forward to contributing to the future of engineering with ASME."