Christopher Brown grew up in a skiing family in northern New York and Vermont. At the University of Vermont he was co-captain of the ski team and an All-American in 1973. From 1975-1977 he coached the men’s alpine team as UVM had two undefeated regular seasons and second and third place finishes in the NCAA Division I championships. This was part of the longest regular season undefeated streak for any sport in NCAA history. At the same time he was beginning his graduate work in Mechanical Engineering. He was finally able to combine his technical and athletic interests by collaborating with research groups on skiing at the University of Vermont Medical School, in Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Chris is a certified Swiss ski coach, a member of the International Society of Skiing Safety, former chair of the sub-committee on ski standards for the American Society of Testing and Materials and is the author of several papers on skiing and ski injuries. Chris’s other areas of research are surface metrology, fractal analysis and manufacturing processes. Chris developed and taught this course in 1995-1996 at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in Hanover during a sabbatical leave from WPI.