For Immediate Release

ASQ Awards 2008 Freund Scholarship

Milwaukee, Wis., July 30, 2008—The American Society for Quality (ASQ) recently awarded its 2008 Richard A. Freund International Scholarship to Amar Thiraviam, Daytona Beach, Fla. This $5,000 scholarship, named after a past ASQ president, supports a quality professional’s graduate studies.

Thiraviam traces his fascination with the quality disciplines back to his days as a child in Chennai, India, where he would observe the goods for sale in his father’s retail store and wonder about how they came to be produced.

This curiosity about how things are made, and a love of numbers, led him to study quality engineering and reliability engineering. He plans to use the scholarship to help him pursue a doctorate degree in industrial engineering at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, where he will concentrate on developing new reliability testing tools.

“Reliability engineering is the discipline that helps you achieve quality at the very first stage, which is design,” he states. “We’re in a phase where companies are starting to realize that, and there’s more and more emphasis on reliability engineering than ever before.”

About the Freund Scholarship
The Richard A. Freund International Scholarship honors the memory of Richard A. Freund, a past president of ASQ (1972–73). Freund was recognized internationally for his contributions to quality, international goodwill, and tireless scholarship. Awarded annually for the past 13 years, the scholarship supports a candidate’s graduate study of the theory and application of quality control, quality assurance, quality improvement, and total quality management. It covers the engineering, statistical, managerial, and behavioral foundations of those fields. The scholarship is offered to ASQ members and nonmembers worldwide.
 

The American Society for Quality, www.asq.org, has been the world’s leading authority on quality for more than 60 years. With more than 90,000 individual and organizational members, the professional association advances learning, quality improvement and knowledge exchange to improve business results, and to create better workplaces and communities worldwide. As a champion of the quality movement, ASQ offers technologies, concepts, tools and training to quality professionals, quality practitioners and everyday consumers, encouraging all to Make Good Great®. ASQ has been the sole administrator of the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award since 1991. Headquartered in Milwaukee, Wis., ASQ is a founding partner of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), a prominent quarterly economic indicator, and also produces the Quarterly Quality Report.