Vanu Bose ’87, SM ’94, PhD ’99, a leading software executive and a member of the MIT Corporation with deep ties to the Institute, died on Saturday at age 52. The cause of his death was a sudden pulmonary embolism.

Bose was the founder and CEO of Vanu, Inc., an innovative firm that provides wireless infrastructure globally and was the first company to receive certification for software-defined radio from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

The firm’s technology, emerging from Bose’s graduate research at MIT, increases the role of software in operating the radio-based component of wireless communications networks, including those used for cellphone communications. Among other things, the technology enables multiple networks to operate on the same devices.

Vanu, Inc. has also developed cellular antenna systems that require relatively small amounts of energy and can run on solar power. The reduction in power needed for these networks has allowed the firm to help build out networks in rural areas around the world, from India to Rwanda to Vermont, and to address what Bose called the “great need for communication” in those areas.

Bose also recognized the humanitarian possibilities of the technology, and put the company to work this fall providing urgent help in hurricane-struck Puerto Rico. Vanu, Inc. is providing over 40 cellular base stations in Puerto Rico, some of which have already helped people find their missing families.

“That makes it all worthwhile, right there,” Bose told Boston’s WBUR radio in October.

Bose had lifelong ties to MIT, growing up around the Institute in an environment filled with faculty, students, and alumni. His father, the late Amar G. Bose, was a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) for nearly a half-century. Amar G. Bose also founded the Bose Corporation in 1964 and was one of the most committed benefactors the Institute has seen.

“The ‘Bose’ name has long been synonymous with brilliance, humility, leadership, and integrity,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “Through his work to use cellular technology to connect the unconnected — most recently, in Puerto Rico — Vanu embodied the very best of the MIT community, advancing the Institute's vision for a better world. He was deeply proud of his father, Amar, and of Amar's impact as an engineer, entrepreneur, and executive. And he built an extraordinary legacy of his own that I know made Amar proud.”

Reif added: “On behalf of MIT, I send my deepest condolences to Judy, Kamala, Prema, Maya, Ursula, and the entire Bose family.”

Vanu Bose earned three degrees from MIT: his Bachelor of Science in 1988, in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Mathematics; his Master of Science in 1994, in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and his PhD in 1999.

Bose’s doctoral thesis, titled “Virtual Radio Architecture,” was supervised by professors John Guttag and David Tennenhouse. Bose’s graduate research came to form the basis of Vanu, Inc., which he founded in 1998, even before Bose had fully completed his PhD work — but after it had become clear that his work had the potential to move the industry forward.  

As a life-long participant in the open, collaborative intellectual atmosphere around MIT, Bose came to appreciate the way MIT alumni who founded companies would stay connected to the Institute and pass on their own insights and pieces of wisdom to students and researchers in the community. 

“I think it’s a unique part of the MIT experience that there are not only so many great founders around, but that they make themselves accessible,” Bose told the EECS Connector, an alumni publication, in 2015.

As a company founder and alumnus himself, Bose made sure to continue the tradition of working to support new generations of MIT researchers. At the time of his death, he was engaged in fostering and guiding the Bose Fellows Program at MIT, an initiative founded in 2014 that gives grants of up to $500,000 for three years, to let faculty members pursue bold, cutting-edge research programs.

“My father would be very happy with the innovation and freedom of exploration that these grants have made possible, as it was exactly what he was all about,” said Bose in 2016, when announcing the latest group of grant recipients. “The awards acknowledge the spirit of insatiable curiosity that my father embraced.”

Vanu Bose also served on the advisory board of the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program, an initiative that adds leadership education to the engineering skills of MIT undergraduates.

And from 2013 onward, Bose served as a member of the MIT Corporation, the Institute’s board of trustees.

“We are all shocked to lose Vanu Bose, a warm and valuable member of our community,” says Robert B. Millard, chairman of the MIT Corporation. “And our hearts go out to Vanu’s family, which has been such an indelible part of MIT.  We've really lost a beautiful human.”

In turn, Bose’s MIT activities were only part of a larger set of civic responsibilities he assumed during his career. Bose was a member of the Board of Trustees for the Boston Museum of Science from 2007 through 2013, helping steer it through a period of growth and development. He also served on the United Nations Broadband Commission for Digital Development, from 2012 through 2015.

In his professional career, Bose also served the Bose Corp. as a member of its Trustee Succession Committee.

Bose won a number of awards and honors in his professional career, including IEEE Spectrum magazine’s “Wireless Winner” in 2007, and the GSM Association Technology Award for Most Innovative Infrastructure Product. He was also named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.

Vanu Bose is survived by his wife, Judith, his daughter, Kamala, his mother, Prema, his sister, Maya and his father's wife, Ursula.

Christine Moulen ’94, library systems manager at the MIT Libraries, passed away on Saturday after a battle with cancer. She was 44.

A libraries employee for more than 20 years, Moulen was a three-time recipient of the Infinite Mile Award and a universally admired colleague.

“Christine was one of the most beloved and well-respected colleagues at the MIT Libraries,” said Director Chris Bourg. “We have lost an extraordinary human being — warm, brilliant, kind, and with a quick smile that few of us will ever forget.”

Moulen began working in the MIT Libraries as a freshman in Course 16 and remained a student employee throughout her undergraduate years. She enjoyed the work so much, she stayed on in a full-time position after graduating with a BS in aeronautics and astronautics in 1994. She began as monograph acquisitions assistant, became monograph acquisitions section head in 1996, and was promoted to library systems manager in 1997.

Moulen’s excellence was recognized not only by her MIT colleagues but also among a global community of peers. In 2016, she received the Azriel Morag Award for Innovation from Ex Libris, “presented annually to a librarian who has shown innovation and initiative.” Moulen was recognized for her contributions to Aleph, the library system underlying the MIT Libraries Barton catalog. The award committee lauded Moulen’s above-and-beyond contributions to this industry community: “Christine’s innovation is not a one-time creation. It is her day-after-day, week-after-week, year-after-year gift of brilliant and innovative answers and solutions to the Aleph user community.”

Moulen will be remembered by her colleagues as “unfailingly patient, gracious under fire, and generous with her time and knowledge.” Libraries staff and users alike benefited from her commitment to providing high-quality service and problem solving. She was also a dedicated member (along with her husband, Anthony Moulen ’94) of the MIT Libraries’ softball team, the Bibliotechs, for more than 15 years.

Anthony Moulen has suggested that those wishing to make a contribution in Christine's memory do so by giving to the Jimmy Fund or St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to help others with cancer.

The MIT Libraries are planning an event to honor Christine Moulen in the next few months; details will be shared at libraries.mit.edu.

Martin Rein, professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning from 1970 until his retirement in 2011, died on Oct. 15 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He was 89.

Rein was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Eastern European immigrants. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1950, he got his first job as a social worker with street gangs, which triggered his lifelong interest in writing and doing research on poverty, social planning and reform, and the social work profession.

He enrolled at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, and went on to get a PhD at Brandeis University in 1961. After seven years teaching future social workers at Bryn Mawr College’s Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Rein landed at MIT, where he remained for more than four decades.

Rein’s early career was devoted to the study of the welfare state, primarily across European and Anglo-Saxon countries, comparing them in particular to the United States. Every country looked different, with its own complicated rules and programs. Although he was very familiar with the detailed features of programs in many countries, he was also trying to look for patterns across them. Looking beyond the details, were there commonalities across countries, and what were the real differences? He did comparative analyses at various levels, looking at impacts of programs on individuals as well as at the overall structure of programs and institutionally how they functioned.

“As a sociologist working with urban planning students, Marty played a major role in cultivating analytical skills in students who are usually idealistic,” noted Bish Sanyal, professor and former head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “Marty’s research with Donald Schön on problem framing is a book which planners need to read even so many years after the publication of the book. His book on 'Dilemmas of Social Reform'remains required reading for all interested in social policies.”

Later in his career, Rein’s main interest was retirement policy. At the individual level for retirement income, Rein did extensive data analysis of “income packaging.” Retirement income can come from many sources, among them public social security, private pensions and saving plans, and ongoing work. He had individual data on the components of income of the elderly across many countries.

In the aggregate, there seemed to be similarities among countries with large and small public programs, since some countries depended more on private programs. The aggregate resources devoted to retirement — public and private — in the United States, for example, were not much smaller than in countries with larger public welfare states because of extensive private pensions. When Rein examined the top 10 percent of older people or the bottom 10 percent, however, the differences were much more pronounced. Taking account of both public and private income sources, he found large differences in inequality among older people between countries even though aggregates were sometimes more similar. Rein realized that the whole impact of the welfare state could not be understood without taking account of both public and private sources of retirement income.

Within the public sector, Rein was also interested in how programs might not be what they seemed. Countries tend to develop distinct programs to deal with seemingly separate problems, such as unemployment, disability, and retirement. But over time, he concluded that programs developed for one purpose often came to be used for another. For example, unemployment insurance is targeted at unemployment, but when benefits run out in countries with high unemployment, people turn to other programs, seeking to qualify for disability benefits or if they are old enough, for early retirement benefits.

The neat dividing lines that supposedly separate programs tend to blur, and all of these programs can become, in part, unemployment programs. The blurring also can go in other directions. While studying early retirement, Rein noticed that workers who were not yet old enough for retirement programs could effectively withdraw from employment early by drawing on unemployment insurance for a while, or on disability benefits — so the disability and unemployment programs could become in part de facto early retirement programs. Of course, once the blurring became obvious enough, countries would try to take corrective actions, and Rein followed the political responses. 

Rein wrote and co-wrote many books on social policy and social reform. Among the most well known were "Dilemmas of Social Reform," with Peter Marris, which became a classic work on the origins of community action, and "Social Policy: Issues of Choice and Change and Frame Reflection," with Donald Schön, which explored why controversies over public policy are so difficult to resolve.

According to Rein’s daughter, her father was an accomplished scholar who was charming, warm, and an extrovert. “He loved Rachmaninoff, a good Gewurztraminer, tending his many orchids, and cooking a good duck confit,” says Lisa Rein, who currently resides in Washington. “He loved Yiddish songs and learned German in his spare time. He never bought a new car.”

Rein is survived by his sister; his two children, Lisa Rein of Silver Spring, Maryland and Glen Rein of Rohnert Park, California; and numerous nieces and nephews, as well as former wives Mildred Rein of Boston and Dalia Marin of Munich, Germany. The family is developing plans for a memorial event; information will be provided on the website of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning when available.

Raymond F. Baddour, the Lammot du Pont Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at MIT, died peacefully at his home Dec. 15, 2017, surrounded by his family.

Baddour received a BS in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame. He received his SM in chemical engineering practice at MIT in 1949 and, upon earning his ScD from MIT in 1951, became an assistant professor in the department. He became a full professor in 1963 and founded MIT's Environmental Laboratory in 1970, becoming its first director. Baddour was head of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 1969 to 1976 and was awarded the Lammot du Pont Professorship in 1969.

While department head, Baddour put together and executed a visionary plan to expand the department's programs in energy and environmental engineering, bioengineering, and applied chemistry. He launched a bold and aggressive hiring initiative that broke with longstanding departmental traditions; now, 30 years later, Course 10 continues to see the positive impact of his vision.

The current home of the Department of Chemical Engineering is a physical example of Baddour’s impact: In order to revitalize and address space concerns for new faculty and research programs, Baddour conceived of the plan to create the Ralph Landau Building (Building 66). He also raised funds for the building completely through private sources, an act that has not been duplicated at the Institute since.

“Professor Baddour has left a great legacy in the department that has touched on almost every aspect of the department’s history and success,” says Paula Hammond, the David H. Koch Professor in Engineering and current department head. “Ray was an institution and a real driver at the biotechnology and pharmaceutical interface when it was still very new in the field of chemical engineering. As a teacher, he will be remembered as an inspirational educator who imbued a generation of students with a passion for chemical engineering.”

In 2014, Baddour made a generous gift to endow the Raymond F. Baddour (1949) Professorship in Chemical Engineering, established to support a distinguished faculty member in the department. Bernhardt Trout is the first and current recipient of the Baddour Professorship.

Baddour was also a role model for entrepreneurship: He started his first company in 1962, and in 1980 co-founded the biopharmaceutical company Amgen, serving as director until 1987. In addition, he was a co-founder of Ascent Pediatrics, MatTek Corp., BREH Partners, BREHK Inc., BLW Corp., Enterprise Management Corp., SKB Inc., Energy Resource Co., Abcor Inc., and Amicon Corp.

Baddour served as director at ActivBiotics Inc., Scully Signal Co., Hyseq Inc., Lam Research Corp., and the Raychem Corp. He was chairman of ERCO, AG. Baddour was a consultant to Oxbow Corp., Mobil Chemical Co., Freeport Minerals Co., Allied Chemical Co., Roger Milliken and Co., Loeb, Rhodes, and Co., LFE Corp., Stauffer Chemical Co., Hooker Chemicals Corp., Avco Research and Advanced Development, Celanese Corp., and Stone and Webster Engineering Corp.

He was a member of the Business Advisory Committee of Medical Science Partners and the Science Advisory Committee of General Motors, Corp. Baddour was a senior postdoc at the National Science Foundation of the Renal Biophysical Laboratory at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He received an honorary doctor of science degree from St. Andrews Presbyterian College.

Baddour leaves his wife of 62 years, Anne; daughter, Cynthia Baddour (Christopher Ryan) of Harvard, Massachusetts; son, Frederick Baddour of Palmetto Bay, Florida; daughter, Jean Nardi (Edward) of Concord, Massachusetts; and five grandchildren.

Burial services will be private; a spring memorial service will be planned. Information will be provided on the MIT Chemical Engineering website, when available.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, 501 St. Jude Place, Memphis, Tennessee, 38105, in memory of Raymond Baddour, or online to the Raymond Baddour Gift Fund.

Donald Rosenfield, the longtime director of MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations program and a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, died Jan. 14 following an accident. He was 70.

A 1971 graduate of MIT, Rosenfield spent the first 15 years of his career as a consultant and teacher. He worked at MIT as a lecturer and a visiting associate professor for much of the 1980s. In 1987, he returned to the Institute for good to help lead a new degree program then known as MIT Leaders for Manufacturing.

“MIT’s bold plan for the future: school joins with business to help end US’ manufacturing decline,” read TheBoston Globe headline on June 19, 1988, when the program was announced. With $46 million and 20 students, Leaders for Manufacturing placed students with corporate partners — including Polaroid, Boeing, and Johnson & Johnson — for six months of hands-on coursework. Then, as today, it was a two-year, dual-degree program. Students earned an MBA from MIT Sloan and a master’s degree from the MIT School of Engineering.

At the time, 28 percent of MIT Sloan students went to work in manufacturing after graduation, while 41 percent entered the finance field, according to the BostonGlobe article. Leaders at MIT worried the United States faced a dearth of managers with a technical education.

“It is perhaps the first time that such a genuine university and industry collaboration has been created, but also such a strong collaboration between schools at MIT: the school of engineering and Sloan,” said MIT Sloan’s Georgia Perakis, now the William F. Pounds Professor of Management who was a faculty co-director of the dual-degree program from 2009 until 2015.

With Rosenfield’s guidance, the program grew and saw its graduates take leadership positions in some of the largest corporations in the United States. Perakis said more than 60 graduates have held upper management positions at Boeing, and she called that a conservative estimate. In 2009, the program was renamed “MIT Leaders for Global Operations” to reflect a broadened approach that looked beyond manufacturing to a company’s entire supply chain.

Institute Professor Thomas Magnanti, who was a founding faculty co-director of Leaders for Manufacturing and a former dean of the School of Engineering, said Rosenfield had a role in every aspect of the program’s development from its inception through his retirement. This included strategy, finance, building relationships with partner companies, developing the curriculum, and working with students. Magnanti said Rosenfield was a “pioneer” of the program, along with himself and then-engineering professor Kent Bowen.

“He was the key player in mentoring and advising the alumni and the students in the program in a wide variety of ways,” Magnanti said. “He became a dear friend to almost all the students who came through the program.”

Jeff Wilke, LGO ’93, CEO of Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer business, called Rosenfield “the plant manager of the LGO/LFM family,” and “uncommonly kind, intensely intelligent, wryly observant, and one of the best friends a person could hope for.”

“Don helped to teach me a very valuable playbook for optimizing operations,” Wilke said in an email. “We used the playbook relentlessly as we built Amazon’s processes. Many other alumni have told me of similar experiences. Don leaves an incredible legacy across hundreds of organizations.”

David Hardt, the Ralph E. and Eloise F. Cross Professor in Manufacturing and professor of mechanical engineering, who was co-director of the LFM program from 1994 until 1998, worked with Rosenfield for nearly three decades.

“To those of us who have lived the full life of the program, Don was the keeper of the culture, the best friend to the students, and the one who made the whole system work” by balancing the goals of everyone involved, Hardt said.

Students, alumni, faculty, and staff of the LFM/LGO program formed a sort of extended family. Rosenfield was known to call each admitted student personally and was regularly present at program events, even after his retirement as program director in 2014. His retirement party, dubbed “DonFest,” drew hundreds of people for a reception at Fenway Park and a conference examining the history of the program, as well as Rosenfield’s contributions to operations research and education. That year, the Leaders for Global Operations program received the UPS George D. Smith Prize for its work preparing students “to be good practitioners of operations research,” according to a forthcoming paper by Rosenfield and Perakis in the academic journal Interfaces.

Colleagues cited Rosenfield’s fantastic memory. He employed his ability to recall details to great effect when keeping tabs on nearly every student who went through the LGO program, more than 1,200 in all. His memory also served him well as an avid Boston sports fan. Magnanti said Rosenfield knew the score of every game in the historic Red Sox 1967 “Impossible Dream” season.

Rosenfield’s own family was part of the extended MIT family. While he was an MIT graduate himself, with three degrees, his wife Nancy also holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from MIT. All three of their children earned bachelor’s degrees from MIT — one for Jennifer, one for Todd, and two for Adam. Todd graduated from the LGO program in 2014, adding two master’s degrees. In all, the Rosenfield family holds ten MIT degrees.

“I think he took great pride in his family and all they’ve accomplished, and I think he also was greatly honored to be part of MIT,” said Stephen Graves, the Abraham J. Siegel Professor of Management and a professor of operations management at MIT Sloan.

Rosenfield also conducted research, including a chapter in “Production in the Innovation Economy,” based on his work with the MIT Task Force on Production and Innovation. He also supervised thesis work for many of the program’s students.

After stepping down as LGO program director, Rosenfield continued to teach for the operations management group at MIT Sloan. He taught Course 15.769 (Operations Strategy) in the fall and Course 15.784 (Operations Lab) in the spring. He was slated to teach Operations Lab again in the Spring 2018 semester. Last semester, he taught Operations Strategy with adjunct associate professor Zeynep Ton. He intended it to be his last time teaching the course. A surprise visit by Harvard Business School professor Roy Shapiro — a classmate of Rosenfield’s from MIT — made the last day of class an emotional event, Perakis said.

Rosenfield first came to MIT in 1965 and earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, an electrical engineer degree, and a master’s degree in operations research in 1971. (He deferred completion of his bachelor’s degree while working on the others). He earned his PhD in operations research at Stanford University in 1974. While a student at MIT, he worked at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory where he “developed computerized prediction models for defense applications,” according to his CV.

Prior to joining MIT Sloan full time, Rosenfield also taught at Harvard Business School, the State University of New York College of Urban and Policy Sciences, and the Boston University School of Management (now the Questrom School of Business). In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a senior consultant at Arthur D. Little, Inc. in Cambridge, where he specialized in operations management, including manufacturing strategy, logistics strategy, and production and inventory planning.

Rosenfield was the co-author of at least five case studies, including examinations of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Dell Inc., and the Tesla Roadster. He was the co-author of two books, “Operations Strategy: Competing in the 21st Century,” published in 2007, and “Modern Logistics Management: Integrating Marketing, Manufacturing and Physical Distribution,” published in 1985.

Throughout his career, Rosenfield was a friend, mentor, and leader whom colleagues remembered for his kindness and the personal attention he gave to each individual. Perakis said Rosenfield was the kindest person she ever met, and she recalled that the pair exchanged books at Christmas each year as gifts.

“Don was the most unselfish person you could find at MIT,” Graves said. “Honest, always positive, always willing to help, caring, with just a great attitude.”

Donald Barry Rosenfield was born July 24, 1947 in Boston. He is survived by his wife, Nancy; his mother, Miriam; his children Jennifer, Todd (Runa), and Adam; two grandchildren; a brother, Alan; and a sister, Cheryl. He lived in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Anthony “Tony” Philip French, MIT professor emeritus in physics and a notable leader in physics education, died on Feb. 3. He was 96 years old.

French was born and educated in Great Britain. After finishing his undergraduate work in 1942, he assisted in the nuclear bomb projects in England and Los Alamos. After the war he completed his graduate work in nuclear physics and became a faculty member at Cambridge University. In 1955 he took a faculty position at the University of South Carolina and shortly later became chair of its physics department. In 1962, he moved to MIT where he developed a new curriculum for introductory physics. In the 1970s as associate chair of physics he managed and led the teaching of MIT's large introductory physics course and wrote four of the MIT Introductory Physics series of textbooks. He also played a role in physics education beyond MIT. From 1975 to 1981 he was chairman of the Commission on Physics Education of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and from 1983 to 1986 he was successively vice president, president-elect, president, and past president of the American Association of Physics Teachers. He retired from MIT in 1991 but remained active in the community of physics educators. In 1993 he chaired the committee that set the examinations for the XXIV International Physics Olympiad.

French was born Nov. 20, 1920, in Brighton, England. The son of a printer, French earned a scholarship to Sydney Sussex College at Cambridge University, following an early interest in science, especially classical mechanics. He was particularly interested in lectures by Egon Bretscher, a Swiss physicist at Cambridge, who steered French toward nuclear physics.

After receiving a BA in physics in 1942, French was recruited by Bretscher into the Tube Alloys Project, Britain's code name for its atomic bomb research. French's job was helping Bretscher measure fast neutron cross-sections, information needed to design a bomb. In 1944, the British effort was merged with the American Manhattan Project, and Tony was sent with the British mission to Los Alamos. “He was 23, barely educated in physics, and suddenly removed from grim wartime Britain to a land of sunshine where you could have oranges and eggs (in Britain the ration was one egg per week) and set down in the mountains of New Mexico with some of the best and most famous physicists in the world,” says Professor Charles H. Holbrow, Colgate University emeritus professor of physics and frequent visitor to MIT. “It was exciting.”

French worked in a group led by physicist Edward Teller, who wanted to develop what would eventually become the hydrogen bomb, the so-called "Super." Teller would not work on the fission bomb project after he was refused leadership of the project's theory group, so he was given a small group to study the Super. Bretscher and French worked in Teller's small group, and French measured reactions of light nuclei such as d + d --> p + 3H and d + 3H --> n + 4He.

After the war ended, French married Naomi Livesay, a mathematician from Montana who had worked in Richard Feynman's computation group at Los Alamos. They spent their honeymoon driving around the American Northwest in a car they bought from fellow Los Alamos researcher and, later, convicted atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs.

In 1946, they moved to Cambridge University in England, where, as a fellow and director of studies in Natural Sciences at Pembroke College, French became a faculty member and earned his doctorate in nuclear physics using declassified results from his work at Los Alamos. French also worked briefly at the new Atomic Energy Research Establishment, known as AERE or, colloquially, Harwell.

In 1955 French emigrated to the United States to teach at the University of South Carolina. A few months after he arrived, he was appointed the new chair when the physics department chairman died. For the next six years, French led the department's vigorous development of research and teaching, and created and taught a course in modern physics. He also wrote his textbook "Principles of Modern Physics."

French was working in the golden age of science education reform. Many critics were calling for a return to fundamentals, “drill and memorization,” but with the launch of Sputnik, the American public demanded higher academic standards in math and science.

In 1956, MIT physics professor Jerrold Zacharias, with support from the National Science Foundation, formed PSSC, the Physical Science Study Committee, a large-scale effort to improve the content and teaching of high school physics. Zacharias and fellow professor Francis Friedman were impressed by French’s physics book and in 1960 invited French to MIT to attend a one-week PSSC workshop.

The workshop was run by Zacharias, Patterson Hume, Donald Ivey, and Eric Rogers. One of French’s favorite experiments from the class was the soda-straw balance, which measured milligrams or less with materials costing no more than a few cents.

In his essay “50 Years Later: Discovering the PSSC: A Personal Memoir,” French declared that the “PSSC had enormous impact on physics teaching, not just in high school but at all levels, and not just in America, but all over the world.”

French took what he learned at MIT and introduced PSSC to South Carolina physics teachers. However, he later noted his frustration with the limitations of PSSC teaching: The Saturday course lasted a whole academic year but didn’t offer academic credit, for one thing. “Some of my participants were probably better off teaching a traditional course that better matched their own limitations,” he recalled. “But there is little doubt in my mind that these conferences played an indispensable role in ensuring that the PSSC program, as it became more and more widely used, would nevertheless preserve its freshness and its distinctive character.”

After being recruited by Zacharias to the MIT physics faculty in 1962, French played a large role in the required introductory physics courses at MIT. When French asked Physics Chairman Bill Buechner to add more students to his small experimental physics course, Buechner replied, "That's of no use to me. Take the whole freshman class." So, French began teaching introductory mechanics to hundreds of freshmen.

"I wanted to be cautious about giving it a name,” said French. “So I called it, blandly, ‘Physics: A New Introductory Course.’ I couldn't imagine how I could have been so stupid. The students read that as ‘PANIC’ … it was known forever afterwards as the PANIC course!”

In 1970, French was appointed associate chair, and through the 1970s and 1980s he managed the introductory physics courses, taught in them, and wrote his MIT "Introductory Physics Series" books. Today, his books on relativity and waves are still being used.

Professor Edwin F. Taylor recalled French’s style of teaching as lecture-based, and that he put a great deal of effort into preparing what he would say in class.

“Think of Lecture Hall 26-100 full twice a day for just physics, watching a demonstration lecture where each basic idea was shown with a set of by-then well-developed standard demonstrations carried out by the lecturer, with a phalanx of professional assistants setting up each one, and working with professionals to develop new ones. Tony French gave most of the monster lectures in 26-100 to HUGE audiences.”

A bit of an introvert, French was “wonderful with words, deeply literate, historically competent,” says Taylor. Added Holbrow, “He was not known as a colorful or flamboyant lecturer. He strove to be lucid and, above all, correct. A number of his publications straighten out kinks that have grown into traditional presentations of physics, correcting myths or dispensing with shortcuts that are bad physics.”

"He had a sense of humor," says Holbrow, “and in the 1960s he had a bout of enthusiasm for writing Clerihews (double-dactyls). For example:

Higglety pigglety
Robert A. Millikan
Scrutinized oil drops
And so measured e;
Studied phenomena
Photoelectrical,
Won the Nobel Prize and
Said 'Look at ME!'

(For more of French's clerihews, see page 128 of Robert L. Weber (ed.) "More Random Walks in Science,"The Institute of Physics, Adam Hilger, Ltd., Bristol, 1982)

French worked with Taylor in 1978 to write "An Introduction to Quantum Physics."“A unique feature of our quantum book was the use of photon polarization states as example of pure, mixed, entangled, and all such features of quantum physics now so central in the news,” recalled Taylor. “We handed out to students little kits that included cleaved calcite crystals, about a centimeter in dimension that separated any incoming light beam into perpendicularly linearly polarized quantum states. This would work for a flood of photons or one photon per hour. In the kit also was a so-called quarter-wave plate (which as I remember converts linearly polarized light into circularly polarized light), tiny Polaroid linear polarizing sheets. When we all wrote the quantum book, many of our described atomic experiments were Thought Experiments, but now can be carried out in practice.”

French said that his focus more on teaching rather than research made him a bit of an “oddball” at MIT. He was grateful to Zacharias for his view that the lecturer in physics was as important as the researcher. French advocated having introductory physics concentrate less on content and more on process; it should show students how physicists think. He was an effective user of demonstrations, and enjoyed devising new ones. These demonstrations won him recognition and were the basis for several publications in the American Journal of Physics. He also collaborated with Philip Morrison and John King, two other innovative MIT physics teachers. “The good synergy among these three helped MIT physics teaching evolve toward what it has become today,” says Holbrow.

French was recognized for his participation in international efforts to improve physics teaching, for editing "Einstein: A Centenary Volume" (1979) and for co-editing "Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume" (1985). In 1976, he received a Distinguished Service Citation from AAPT. In 1980, he was awarded the University Medal of the Charles University, Prague, for contributions to physics education, and in 1988, the Bragg Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics (London) for contributions to the teaching of physics. In 1989, AAPT awarded him the Hans Christian Oersted Medal in recognition of his notable contributions to the teaching of physics, and in 1993 its Melba Newell Phillips Award for "his creative leadership, for his dedicated service, and for his exceptional contributions to physics education."

French lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His first wife, Naomi (Livesay) French, died in 2001. In 2002 he married Dorothy Jensen-French, and is survived by her. He is also survived by his children Martin French and Gillian Peck; by his step-children Peter, Christine, Katheryn and Lisa; and by his granddaughter Sara French.

Institute Professor Emeritus Morris Halle, one of the most accomplished and influential scholars in the field of linguistics, died of natural causes on Monday at age 94.

Halle was an expert in phonology, the structure of sounds in language. His wide-ranging work helped establish his own field as an important domain of research and helped systematize inquiry into the subject. Halle’s work was part of a revolution in linguistics that helped scholars understand human language as a phenomenon with a deep and universal structure, which stemmed from distinctive human faculties.

Beyond his own research, Halle helped found MIT’s renowned linguistics program and helped imbue it with its intellectual ethos, by encouraging meticulous research, a fruitful combination of empirical work and theory, and a spirit of collaborative, open-ended inquiry, which Halle exemplified throughout his own academic life.

Halle and Institute Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky developed groundbreaking research together in the 1950s and 1960s — after Halle played a key role in bringing Chomsky to MIT in 1955. Together, Chomsky and Halle worked to specify the innate foundations dictating the structure of human language, extending Chomsky’s work on syntax into a rule-governed framework describing the sounds produced in English.

“Morris and I were very close for almost 70 years, working together, sharing much else,” Chomsky told MIT News in response to Halle’s death. “His contributions to modern linguistic science are incalculable, not least right here at MIT, where even apart from his groundbreaking work, he was primarily responsible for creating what quickly became, and has remained, the center of a research enterprise that has flourished all over the world, far beyond anything in the millennia of inquiry into language. [Halle was] a wise and compassionate person, more than anyone I’ve known, whose kindness, warmth, and care touched many lives.”

David Pesetsky, the head of the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, said Halle was a profoundly influential researcher and educator — and a touchstone for MIT linguists over his whole career.

“Morris was an epoch-defining figure in the history of modern linguistics — not only for his scientific contributions, which helped launch the modern era of our field, but also for his revolutionary approach to graduate education,” said Pesetsky, the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics.

Pesetsky added: “Here at MIT, Morris created a linguistics program unlike any other at the time, which involved students in the process of discovery from the very beginning, took their ideas and findings seriously, and demanded no less from the students themselves. This vision, a very MIT vision, is now everywhere in linguistics, but it was Morris's vision. But Morris was more than just the visionary father of our program and a model scientist. He was also the soul of our program, whom we loved and turned to for direction and advice as students and for years thereafter.”

Donca Steriade, the Class of 1941 Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, and a former PhD student of Halle, heralded his commitment to teaching and the confidence he instilled in his students.

“What his former students remember more than Morris’ advice and ideas — wise and abundant as these were — is that he treated us as individually responsible for the future of our field,” Steriade said. “It really concentrates the mind to understand this, within weeks of landing at MIT. He saw his job as that of equipping us with a bit of background knowledge and making us appreciate some of the unsolved problems. The hope was that we would decide to solve them, and acquire an education in the process.”

Creating a department, making a revolution

Morris Halle was born in Latvia in 1923, in a Jewish family. His father, a businessman, moved his branch of the family to the United States in 1940, after Germany invaded Poland. However, other relatives of Halle did not emigrate, and only a small portion of Latvia’s Jewish population survived the Nazi occupation.

Halle first studied at the City College of New York, before entering the U.S. military and serving in France during World War II. Halle later downplayed his military efforts — “I just did what they told me,” he said to MIT News in 2010 — and returned to the U.S. to resume his education. After receiving a master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Chicago and then studying at Columbia University, Halle received his PhD in linguistics from Harvard under an eminent scholar, Roman Jakobson.

Among many other skills, Halle was a polyglot whose unusual fluency in languages extended to English, German, French, Russian, Latvian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. That facility helped Halle in 1951 earn a job at MIT teaching German and Russian, as the Institute did not have a formal department devoted to research and teaching in linguistics.

But Halle had an expansive vision for linguistics at MIT. He saw the possibilities for a full-fledged research department, one that could pursue work on innovative ideas. That vision started becoming a reality after Halle, who was conducting acoustic research of Russian at MIT’s Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE), hired the scholar Carol Chomsky, who would later become a linguist at Harvard. As a result, Halle got to know her husband, Noam Chomsky.

In their first conversation, as Noam Chomsky recounted to MIT News in 2012, Halle and Chomsky “immediately had a big argument about something, and later I thought he had some good points.” Chomsky added: “Anyway, we very quickly became close friends.” Halle, Chomsky, and biologist Eric Lenneberg soon began an extended dialogue about their novel approach to linguistic explanation, and ultimately Chomsky joined the MIT faculty.

“In the summer of 1955, Chomsky, with whom I was friends, needed a job,” Halle told MIT News. “So I went to the department head and I said, ‘Why don’t we hire Chomsky?’”

It was a sound recommendation. Chomsky helped change linguistics with his concept of universal grammar, which holds that language is not simply acquired through social learning, but relies on an innate faculty — which in turn implies that all languages have common structures. Chomsky worked primarily on syntax, the principles underlying the organization of language, but Chomsky and Halle collaborated extensively to extend these concepts to phonology.

One result of the Chomsky-Halle partnership was their seminal 1968 book, “The Sound Pattern of English” — often simply called “SPE” — which systematically set out the rules that convert strings of abstract minimal units (known as phonemes) into uttered sounds, in English. According to this hypothesis, the path from mind to speech runs through a set of ordered rules, each one transforming its input in a specified way.

In the half-century since SPE appeared, alternate hypotheses have emerged to account for the formation of sounds in English. But the book has had immense influence, pushing the field forward by developing such a broad explanatory framework.

Halle’s work extended well beyond the general hypothesis presented in SPE. Among other things, Halle also conducted far-ranging research into the sound patterns of Russian. And in the 1990s, Halle also spent years developing another broad theoretical framework connecting syntax and sound, termed “distributed morphology,” which he created along with linguist Alec Marantz, among other contributors. This refinement outlined a set of operations through which morphemes, the smallest units of sound, are mobilized in the process of speech.

“Argue with me!”

Among Halle’s many characteristics as a scholar, one of the most enduring was his absolute belief that intellectual research and debate should occur on the basis of substantive insight, without regard to the formal academic hierarchy. Generations of students heard Halle utter a familiar phrase — “Argue with me!” — that served as an invitation for reasoned, empirical discussion.

That form of mentorship was powerful, and it sought to produce intellectual progress rather than rigid disciples. In the 2016 edition of the Annual Review of Linguistics, Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that Halle, apart from his vast output of research, “has had an equally profound influence through his role as a teacher and mentor, and this personal influence has not been limited to students who follow closely in his intellectual and methodological footsteps. It has been just as strong — or stronger — among researchers who disagree with his specific ideas and even his general approach, or who work in entirely different subfields.”

In a 1974 lecture that Halle made before the members of the Linguistic Society of America, he characteristically declared that “the linguist must be prepared to lose as well as to win.” Asked about that declaration in 2010, Halle instantly quipped, “I was younger then.” However, he quickly added, “If you believe something, put your money where your mouth is, and 10 years later you will know if you were right or wrong. Nobody else will need to tell you when you’re whipped.”

Halle’s graduate students, by many accounts (including a large number compiled by Liberman in that same article) often found him daunting and exacting at first, but came to realize how invested Halle was in them, and how supportive he was as their work progressed. 

“Soon after Morris founded MIT’s linguistics department,” Steriade said, “significant contributions to this research program were made by Morris’ and Noam’s students and colleagues, and then by their own hundreds of students and students’ students. Most phonologists active today trace their academic lineage, directly or indirectly, to Morris.”

Just last week, Steriade said, Halle told two former students, “We did some good teaching.”

Samuel Jay Keyser, an emeritus professor of linguistics who knew Halle for decades, on Monday paid tribute to Halle’s influential collaboration with Chomsky and his lifetime of good works on behalf of others.

“It is impossible to think of Morris Halle without thinking of Noam Chomsky,” Keyser observed. “These two individuals were the pillars upon which theoretical linguistics in the 20th century and beyond was built. They are responsible not only for the best linguistics department in the world, but for sending hundreds of students out into the world to try to do the same.”

Keyser recalled telling students that “Morris should be their role model. He is not superhuman, but he is as good as a human being can be. … He was my mentor, my role model, and my friend for over 50 years. Now, sad to say, one of the pillars has crumbled. It had to come. But that doesn’t make it any easier.”

For his part, Pesetsky summarized the centrality of Halle to MIT’s linguistics program, and the degree of respect his colleagues held for him, by reflecting on a large 50th anniversary celebration the linguistics department held in 2011, with multiple days of talks and events.

“When our program celebrated its 50th year in 2011, we had Morris's friend and lifelong co-conspirator Noam Chomsky as the final speaker on the second-to-last day of our celebration, but the final slot on the final day belonged to Morris,” Pesetsky said. “None of the several hundred alumni and colleagues in the room needed to be told why, and no other ending was ever discussed.”

Halle was married for 56 years to his wife Rosamond, who died in 2011. Halle is survived by his sons, David, John, and Tim, and his grandchildren, Casey, Ben, Cecilia, and Rosie. An MIT service honoring Halle is planned for Saturday, May 5.

Retired MIT Professor Joseph Sussman passed away on Tuesday, March 20, at the age of 79 following a long illness. An MIT alumnus and professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), Sussman is fondly remembered for his dedication to his students and to the MIT community.

Sussman received a bachelor’s in civil engineering from City College of New York in 1961, a master's of civil engineering from the University of New Hampshire in 1963, and his PhD from MIT in 1967. Shortly after completing his doctoral program, Sussman became a professor in CEE.

Sussman was a professor for over 50 years and served as department head in CEE from 1980 to 1985. In 1991 he was awarded the inaugural JR East Professorship, an endowed chair that spurred the establishment of a long-standing partnership between the East Japan Railway Company (JR East) and MIT. He was awarded the CEE Distinguished Service and Leadership Award in 2017 for his devotion to encouraging a culture of diversity, inclusiveness, and innovation and for embodying the department mission and vision of MIT. At the ceremony, Sussman was honored for his friendship and mentorship to both students and fellow faculty members and for his support of all CEE community events.

“Joe was a special person and colleague. He never hesitated to lend a hand, offer advice, and support students and colleagues,” says Markus Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering and head of CEE. “I vividly remember when I first met Joe during my interview, and later for coffee shortly after I joined the faculty at MIT. His passion for mentoring and teaching, and focus on students, was evident in everything he did during his long tenure at MIT. We will all miss him dearly and are deeply grateful for the time we could spend with him, and what he has taught us.”

“I first met Joe on Engineering Council when he was serving as an interim director of [the Engineering Systems Division]. He introduced himself jokingly as being part of a recycling program at MIT; given that he was a department head almost 30 years before. Since that day, I really enjoyed our interactions,” recalls Munther Dahleh, director of IDSS and the William A. Coolidge Professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “Joe was always collegial irrespective of the context. I got to know him well during the launch period of IDSS. He always took the time to give thoughtful and constructive comments and was always supportive of the outcomes. He cared a lot about students and their experiences at MIT and emphasized that during the formation of IDSS. We developed a friendship in the last few years that I will always cherish. It is people like Joe that make MIT a special place. I will miss him dearly.”

Sussman taught and mentored many undergraduate students and advised over 120 master's theses and over 20 doctoral dissertations during his tenure, and maintained relationships with a number of his former students. He led the Regional Transportation Planning and High-Speed Rail Research Group (R/HSR), a close-knit community of scholars who frequently held get-togethers and convened for reunions at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board.   

Sussman took great pride in mentoring students and spoke affectionately of his relationships with his students and research group members, a sentiment reciprocated by those who worked with him. Many of his former students and mentees laud his leadership and dedication to both their research and to their personal development.

“Joe’s research accomplishments were numerous and extraordinary, but he has so many other lasting legacies,” says Joanna Moody, a graduate student in R/HSR and mentee of Sussman. “I think that one of the most often mentioned — and for me very personally important — was how much he connected with his students. He cared as much about how your personal life was progressing as he did your research.” 

Sussman’s research focus was on large scale complex engineering systems, which he applied to freight rail, intelligent transportation systems, and market selection processes.

As a graduate student at MIT, Sussman worked on the application of computing to engineering processes, a project called Integrated Civil Engineering Systems (ICES). He later worked on intelligent transportation systems (ITS), the use of advanced technology to make transportation networks operate efficiently. Sussman was a member of a small group who developed the first national strategic plan for ITS in the United States. In 2015, Sussman was inducted into the Intelligent Transportation Society of America Hall of Fame.

In recent years, Sussman led the development of complex, large-scale, integrated, open, sociotechnical (CLIOS) systems and the CLIOS Process, a theoretical framework that can be applied to complex systems. Sussman and members of his group applied the CLIOS Process to complex systems including ITS, wind energy (Cape Wind), air defense, and the introduction of broadband access in Kenya.

“I was privileged to work with Joe Sussman for over 50 years,” says Daniel Roos, professor emeritus of engineering systems and CEE and longtime friend of Sussman. “He had an unmatched dedication and commitment to MIT and his students, winning three teaching awards in CEE, the Technology and Policy Program, and the Engineering Systems Division.”

Sussman also led the first 25 years of the JR East-MIT partnership, resulting in a number of joint research projects. Over the years Sussman collaborated with professionals at JR East, staff members from the company came to study at MIT, and MIT students interned with JR East in Japan. At the 25th anniversary of the program, Sussman noted that “the greatest honor in my professional career has been to serve as the first JR East Professor.”

“Joe was a wonderful human being, a great and caring mentor to his students, and a wonderful colleague. He will be truly missed,” says Ali Jadbabaie, a professor of CEE, associate director of IDSS, and the second recipient of the JR East Professorship.

A memorial service at MIT will be held in the near future. In lieu of flowers, the Sussman family requests that donations are made to the Joseph and Henri-Ann Book Fund at the Lincoln Public Library.

Pierre Leonc Thibaut Brian, professor emeritus in the Department of Chemical Engineering, died on April 2 at age 87.

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on July 8, 1930, Brian received a BS in chemical engineering from Louisiana State University in 1951. He earned his ScD in chemical engineering from MIT in 1956, supervised by Professor Edwin R. Gilliland. Upon graduation, he immediately joined the faculty of the Department of Chemical Engineering as director of the Bangor Station of the Chemical Engineering Practice School. As a professor, Brian’s research focused largely on mass and heat transfer with simultaneous chemical reaction. He was an early adopter of computers in chemical engineering and contributed to the associated opportunities in process control and numerical analysis.

“Thibaut was well known for many qualities but two may head the list: high energy and quickness of insight. He projected enormous energy and worked extremely hard — and this made him a captivating teacher,” says Ken Smith, the Gilliland Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering. “When Thibaut was presented with a complex, ill-defined problem, he would almost instantly understand what the essential elements really were and how one should go about attacking it.”

In 1972, Brian retired from MIT and joined Air Projects as vice president of engineering, where he remained until 1994. Brian’s early contributions at Air Products were mainly of a technical sort, largely in the context of air separation. Later, he became a very effective advocate for enhanced safety in the chemical process industry and particularly for sophisticated quantitative hazard analyses as a means of assessing risks. As a result of his efforts, Air Products’ safety record became one of the best in the industry and other companies emulated their procedures.

Brian was an active member and director of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers; he received its Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering Award in 1973 and its R.L. Jacks Award (now re-named the Management Award) in 1989. Churchill College of Cambridge in the United Kingdom elected him to the position of Overseas Fellow, and hosted him for a sabbatical year. Brian was a member of the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology and the American Industrial Health Council. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1975 for his “contributions to both theory and engineering practice of desalination, mass transfer in chemically reactive systems, and the technology of liquefied gases.” Brian was elected to foreign membership in the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK) in 1991. In 1972, he authored the book, “Staged Cascades in Chemical Processing.”

Predeceased in 2016 by his wife of 64 years, Geraldine 'Gerry,' he is survived by his son Richard and daughter-in-law Susan; his son James and daughter-in-law Sheryl; his daughter, Evelyn 'Evie'; his grandchildren, Richard Christopher Brian and Lauren Brian Spears; and by his great grandson, Olin Thomas Spears. Condolences may be made to brownandsonsfuneral.com.

Leon Trilling, a professor emeritus in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and co-founder of the Massachusetts Department of Education's statewide METCO Program, passed away on April 20. He was 93.

Trilling was born in Bialystok, Poland, on July 15, 1924, the son of Oswald and Regina (Zakhejm) Trilling. The family fled to France in the 1930s, and in 1940, Trilling came to the United States and enrolled as an undergraduate at Caltech. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1946.

Trilling received a BS in mechanical engineering in 1944, a master of science in 1946, and a PhD in aeronautics in 1948, all from Caltech. He was also for a time a Caltech research fellow and instructor. After a year in Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship, he began his MIT career in 1951 as a research associate in the Department of Aeronautical Engineering, which eight years later was renamed the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). Trilling spent 1963 studying gas dynamics at the University of Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

At MIT, Trilling focused his research on the development of jet aircraft; the history of engineering, technology, and science; and the role of the science and mathematics curricula in middle schools. In 1978, in addition to his position in AeroAstro, he joined the faculty of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, based in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, where his teaching centered on the history of engineering, technology, and science — in particular, the relationship between technology and the military.

Trilling’s community involvement began in 1965. He and his family had settled in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he served as president of the Brookline School Committee. He was well aware of the lack of diversity in the classroom. He believed that equal economic and cultural opportunity begins with equal educational opportunity, and he helped to design a program that would expand public school students’ educational opportunities, increase diversity, and reduce racial isolation by allowing individuals to attend schools in communities other than their own.

Concerned Brookline residents including Governor Michael Dukakis and his wife Kitty worked closely with Trilling to transform his idea into reality. “This was a time when people of color could not live in the town of Brookline,” Dukakis recalls. “Leon was deeply involved. He was active at a time when some of these ridiculous prejudices and biases were beginning to crumble. He had a very strong set of values, and we greatly admired what he did.”

In 1966, Trilling’s vision of educational equality became METCO. The program has expanded beyond Brookline, and today, as administered by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, is the second-oldest voluntary program in the country dedicated to increasing diversity in schools.

Trilling's leadership helped bridge cultural and racial differences and increase diversity on the MIT campus as well. He founded MIT’s Integrated Studies Program; played pivotal roles in the Office of Minority Education, the MIT Second Summer Program, and the Course XVI Outreach Committee; served as academic advisor to the MITES program; and co-directed the New Liberal Arts program. He was a senior staff member of The Institute for Learning and Teaching and was passionate about introducing minority students to science and engineering.

Professor Emeritus Louis Bucciarelli ’66, was a student of Trilling’s in the early 1960s while studying for his PhD in aeronautics and astronautics, and later, he became Trilling’s colleague in the department. “Throughout my years on the faculties of the School of Engineering and the program in STS, Leon was a natural ally in working to broaden undergraduate education,” says Bucciarelli. “He was always available to hear me out, to read and critique my proposals and essays. He was a mentor who showed how, with clear thinking, persistence and drive, it was possible to bridge the cultures of engineering and the humanities at MIT.”

In 1972, Trilling invited Wesley Harris, now the C. S. Draper Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, to join the MIT faculty. “He served as my mentor, my guide, and my counselor,” says Harris. “He provided a philosophical basis that allowed me as an African American to flourish in a sharply racist environment. He had a sense of humanity that he exercised in such a way that everything he touched became better.”

In a 2002 interview with Clarence G. Williams, founder of MIT’s Black History Project, Trilling explained, “The essence is to create an atmosphere which is encouraging to young people of a minority background who would consider the possibility of careers in the field, to keep them interested, to keep them confident that they can do the job, and to show them that there are role models for them at MIT to be sure, and elsewhere, also.”

Merritt Roe Smith, the Cutten Professor of the History of Technology in the STS program, remembers Trilling as one of the first professors he met when he came to MIT in 1978. “I remember him as a true gentleman scholar, whose European background and education made him a special type of intellectual who deeply appreciated the humanistic and social science dimensions of engineering,” he says.

“We ended up teaching a course together on the role of the military as a catalyst of technological change. It was in that class that I came to appreciate his technical expertise and how he deftly combined it with a wide-ranging knowledge of the history of science and technology. He was a genuinely good person who cared a lot about students of all ages. I will miss him. His was a special presence among us.”

After his retirement in 1994, Trilling continued teaching at MIT for another 23 years. As recently as 2016, Trilling took public transportation to Kendall Square in Cambridge each day and climbed the steep stairway to the MIT campus. In a video produced that year by Jonathan Sachs for Boston’s Commission on Affairs of the Elderly, Trilling revealed his secret to longevity. “Keep busy,” he said. “Get yourself emotionally involved, and feel that you’re doing something useful.”

Trilling explained the motivation for his work in justice and civil rights in his interview with Williams. “It comes from having come as a Polish Jew to the United States in 1940 and having been welcomed for what I was, given every opportunity and being … profoundly inspired by this hospitality,” he said. “In fact, this is what the United States means to me most, that it is an open society which believes in and tries to promote equality of opportunity.”

In 1996, Trilling received MIT’s Martin Luther King Leadership Award in recognition of his “deep and enduring commitment to improving the quality of education for people of color.”

Harris describes Trilling as “a true renaissance man, a learned scholar, a highly cultured individual, and extremely well read.” Generations of students will remember him for his insights and inspiration, his soft-spoken manner, and his signature red neckties.

Trilling was preceded in death by his wife, Edna. He is survived by two sons, Roger and Alex, and one daughter-in-law, Marlene.

The Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics will sponsor a memorial service for Trilling on Thursday, May 31 at 4 p.m. in the MIT Chapel. For more information and to rsvp, visit bit.ly/trilling-memorial.

In lieu of flowers, donations in Trilling’s name may be made to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Irving M. London, founding director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and an expert in the molecular regulation of hemoglobin synthesis, died on May 23 at age 99. 

The HST community had recently celebrated London’s life and accomplishments on the occasion of his approaching 100 birthday. London expressed great pleasure in the festivities, held on May 7.

London was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on July 24, 1918. He graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor of arts degree, summa cum laude, in 1939; he simultaneously earned a second bachelor’s degree from the Hebrew College in Roxbury, Massachusetts. London weighed attending law school versus medical school after graduation, eventually accepting an offer from Harvard Medical School (HMS). His tenure at HMS instilled in him a love of research that spanned the rest of his career.

After graduation, London accepted an internship at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. His training was interrupted by World War II, where he served as a captain in the Medical Corps. He was also part of a research effort that showed the efficacy of chloroquine as an anti-malarial drug. At the end of his military service, he was assigned to Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific to serve as the physician for the Congressional delegation to the atom bomb tests.

London returned to New York to resume his residency after the war. Following residency, he took up a research fellowship in the Department of Biochemistry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He soon joined the faculty and embarked on a rich research, teaching, and clinical tenure at Columbia. In 1954, London became the founding chair of the Department of Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He served as professor and chair of the department, and directed medical services at the Bronx Municipal Hospital Center until 1970.

In 1968 London was invited to serve as a consultant to MIT and Harvard Medical School to assist in the planning of a new program joining the two institutions. He then devoted a sabbatical year to carrying out the initial program development, including garnering the support of the faculties of both MIT and HMS. In 1970, he accepted the directorship of this new entity, the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. HST represents London’s commitment to the integration of medical education and university education, and integration of interdisciplinary biomedical research, education and medical practice. London, who was professor of medicine at HMS and professor of biology at MIT, served as the director of HST until 1985.

London received numerous awards and honors over the years for his groundbreaking work explaining the molecular regulation of hemoglobin synthesis at the level of gene transcription and translation into protein. The honors include: a Welch Fellowship in Internal Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences from 1949-1952, the Theobald Smith Award in Medical Sciences of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1953, the Commonwealth Fund Fellowship at Institut Pasteur from 1962-1963, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963, charter membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1970, and elected membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1971. From 1982 to 2003, he served first on the board of directors and then on the Biosciences Advisory Committee of the pharmaceutical company Johnson and Johnson.

Looking back over his career, London derived great satisfaction from having played a key role in the founding of three institutions known for their contributions to medical research, practice, and education: Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and HST. His passion for HST never abated. As late as fall 2017, he continued to teach and co-direct HST.140 (Molecular Medicine), a course that he developed with Paul Gallop in 1979. London was present for most of HST’s major events, including the HST Forum, HST dinner seminars, and HST graduation. There he shared his intellect, wit, and warmth with the students, faculty, alumni, and staff of HST.

London was preceded in death by his wife, Huguette. He is survived by his sons, Robb and David, as well as Robb’s children Jacob and Danielle.

London was looking forward to HST’s 50th anniversary in 2020. His pioneering work in creating a unique physician/scientist/engineer training program is his enduring legacy, and positions HST well for the next 50 years.

As technology, trade, and globalization tie the world’s cultures and communities ever closer together, the responsibility of each to guarantee and protect the well-being of the others grows in step — and that goes for nations and corporations alike.

That was the message that Kofi Annan SM ’72, the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations from 1996 to 2007, had for members of the MIT Sloan community in October of 2002, when he spoke to mark the 50th anniversary of his alma mater.

Annan, the first black African to hold the top U.N. post, died Saturday at the age of 80 from a short and unspecified illness.

In the talk, Annan said his time as an MIT Sloan Fellow during the early part of his career, which he spent almost entirely with the U.N., broadened his perspective on how to achieve international change and cooperation.

“Sloan looked well beyond the confines of this campus, encouraged people from many nations to study here, and was eager to advance the cause of international cooperation, scholarly and otherwise,” Annan said.

That education would come in handy later on, he noted, as he helped the U.N. navigate some of its most challenging moments and found himself negotiating across from many of the world’s most powerful leaders.

Halfway through his tenure as secretary-general, Annan and the U.N. were jointly awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for their work to create a “better organized and more peaceful world,” containing the spread of HIV in Africa and working to oppose international terrorism.

But Annan also faced his fair share of challenging diplomatic situations. As the U.N.’s chief of peacekeeping, he oversaw the response to the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s, and later worked feverishly in an attempt to dissuade the United States from launching its 2003 invasion of Iraq. He told Time magazine in 2013 that his failure to prevent that action was “his darkest moment.”

Even after he left the U.N., he returned in various capacities, being tapped in 2012 to help find a resolution for the still-raging civil war in Syria. He also launched the Kofi Annan Foundation, a nonprofit that works to promote better global governance and world peace.

The challenges facing the world are much the same now as they were in 2002 — cultural distrust leading to violence, uncertainty in the markets raising global anxiety, and concerns that globalization is enriching a select few at the expense of the many. But Annan’s emphasis on shared responsibility led to the formation of partnerships between the U.N., major corporations, and the world’s governments designed to ensure sustainable progress for all during his tenure.

Annan, in the MIT Sloan speech, emphasized the importance of trust and understanding among the world’s governing institutions and highlighted the crucial role of global business in helping to solve those problems.

“Businesses may ask why they should go down this path, especially if it involves taking steps that competitors might not, or steps they feel are rightly the province of governments,” he said. “Sometimes, doing what is right … is in the immediate interest of business.”

Corporations, he said, should see it as their responsibility to use their resources to pass knowledge, technology, and training along to the communities in which they operate.

When German car manufacturer Volkswagen found that it was losing some of its best managers to HIV/AIDS in Brazil, Annan described, the company implemented an education and treatment program, which saw the employees survive to pass the same information on to their communities.

He continued: “Sometimes we must do what is right simply because not to do so would be wrong. And sometimes, we do what is right to help usher in a new day, of new norms and new behaviors. We do not want business to do anything different from their normal business; we want them to do their normal business differently.”

Absent that effort, he said, the world risks rejecting global citizenship and retreating into protectionism and isolation, to the detriment of all.

“All of us — the private sector, civil society, labor unions, NGOs, universities, foundations, and individuals — must come together in an alliance for progress,” Annan said. “Together, we can and must move from value to values, from shareholders to stakeholders, and from balance sheets to balanced development. Together, we can and must face the dangers ahead and bring solutions within reach.”

Alan S. Hanson PhD '77, who served as executive director of International Nuclear Leadership Education Program within the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) until June 2015, died on Aug. 4 from metastatic cancer at the age of 71.

Hanson was born in Chicago, Illinois, on Dec. 27, 1946. He received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1969 from Stanford University, and a PhD in nuclear engineering in 1977 from MIT. His passion for discovery and learning led him back to school to earn a master's degree in liberal studies at Georgetown University in 2009.

Before returning to MIT in 2012, Hanson served for more than 30 years in increasingly senior executive positions in the nuclear industry, accumulating broad managerial, international, and engineering experience, most of which was devoted to the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear waste management, and issues of non-proliferation

Hanson joined the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria in 1979, where he served first as coordinator of the International Spent Fuel Management Program and later as policy analyst with responsibilities in the areas of safeguards and non-proliferation policies.

Upon returning to the U.S., Hanson served as president and CEO of Transnuclear, Inc. In 2005 he was appointed as executive vice president of technologies and used fuel management at AREVA NC Inc. In this position he was responsible for all of AREVA’s activities in the backend of the nuclear fuel cycle in the U.S.

He completed a year-long assignment as a visiting scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University on loan from AREVA in 2011. At CISAC he conducted research on the worldwide nuclear supply chain and international fuel assurance mechanisms.

In 2012 Hanson returned to MIT as the executive director of NSE’s International Nuclear Leadership Education Program (INLEP). INLEP, an intensive executive education course designed for nuclear leaders from countries new to nuclear power, was the only program of its kind in the world.

Hanson proved to be an outstanding leader of INLEP. Professor Richard Lester, then head of NSE, recalled him as "a man of great ability and great integrity." Added Lester, "Alan listened carefully before he spoke, but he never hesitated to say what he thought. We could always be sure that he would put the interests of the department and MIT first, and during his service as INLEP executive director I relied on him implicitly for his wisdom, judgment, commitment and dedication."

Hanson’s love for the outdoors took him on hiking trips on the Appalachian Trail, Acadia National Park, and through Austria and Ireland. Over the last few years he helped clear trails with the Lewisboro Land Trust. Jazz, classical music, and reading were also amongst Hanson’s joys.

Loved by all who knew him, Hanson is remembered as a kind, brilliant man, devoted to family, friends, and colleagues alike. He is survived by his wife of 34 years, Bairbre; his daughter Alanna Reed and son-in-law Tim Reed; son Colin Hanson; his two grandchildren, Madeline and Molly Reed; his sister Shelley Ruth; and nephew Jason.

A celebration of his life will be held on Sept. 8 in Croton Falls, New York.

Shih-Ying Lee, a longtime MIT mechanical engineering professor and expert in process control, measurement, and instrumentation, passed away peacefully on July 2 in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Lee '43, SCD '45 had recently celebrated his 100th birthday in April.

Lee’s career spanned over six decades and included positions in both academia and industry. In 2015, he provided an overview of his professional and personal achievements in his autobiography entitled, “From Tsinghua to MIT — My Journey from Education to Entrepreneurship.”

Born in Beijing (known at the time as Beiping), China, on April 30, 1918, Lee was drawn to engineering at an early age. He received a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University in the midst of World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War. Upon graduating, Lee worked as a bridge designer and hydraulic power research engineer for the Chinese government.

Eager to continue his education in the United States, Lee made a harrowing journey halfway around the world in the midst of global conflict. He flew first to India, then took a ship to the U.S. via South America. In 1942 he enrolled at MIT, where he received master's and doctor of science degrees in civil engineering.

After a two-year stint at Cram and Ferguson Architects, Lee returned to MIT as a research engineer in the Dynamic Analysis and Control Lab. He joined the faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in 1952. Throughout his tenure as a professor, Lee made extensive improvements to several courses including 2.171 (at the time, Fluid Power Control) and 2.173 (Measurement and Control).

Lee’s interest in measurement and instrumentation extended beyond the classrooms of MIT. He shared an entrepreneurial spirit and interest in startups with his brother, MIT professor of aeronautics Yao-Tzu Li SM '38, SCD '39. In 1953, they co-founded Dynisco Inc., which manufactured pressure-measuring instruments. To focus on his work at MIT, Lee sold Dynisco to the American Brake Shoe Company in 1960.  

Less than a decade later, the brothers formed Setra Systems Inc., which specialized in instruments for sensing and measuring. The company designed and manufactured devices such as accelerometers, pressure transducers, and laboratory balances. These instruments, and all other products produced by Setra, had variable capacitance sensors, an application co-developed by Lee and his brother.

In 1974, Lee retired after 22 years on the mechanical engineering faculty at MIT. For the next three decades, much of his professional focus was on Setra Systems, where he served as chair and chief executive officer in the 1990s. Many of his patents involved pressure and force sensing products developed at Setra.

Throughout his career, Lee received a number of prestigious awards in recognition of his many contributions to the fields of process control, instrumentation, and sensing. In 1981 he received the Rufus Oldenburger Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for his permanent contribution to the field of automatic control. Several years later, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for “original research on control valve stability, for innovative dynamic measurement instrumentation, and for successful entrepreneurial commercialization of his inventions.” He also received the Technical Excellence Award from the International Society of Weighing and Measurement for his introduction of a new force and weight sensing method.

Lee was married to his first wife, May Kao Lee, for 22 years until her death. He was married to his second wife, Lena Yin Lee for 45 years until her death in May 2018. In 1991, Lee and Lena established the Shih-Ying (1943) & Lena Y. Lee Endowed Fellowship Fund in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The scholarship was most recently awarded to a graduate student in 2016.

Later in his life, Lee enjoyed keeping up with the latest personal computing devices, staying fit with his daily walks and exercises, connecting with his children and grandchildren, and playing Scrabble with his wife at their home in Lincoln. He is survived by their four children: Carol Lee; David Lee ME '73, PhD ’80; Linda Lee PhD '85; and Eileen Brooks. 

Jean Pierre de Monchaux, an idealistic and optimistic planner and architect who served as dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning from 1981 to 1992, passed away on April 30, after living with Parkinson’s disease for 20 years. He was 81.

De Monchaux, also known as John, came to MIT after many years’ professional experience in the United States, the United Kingdom, South America, Australia, and Southeast Asia. His international upbringing in Dublin, Montréal, New York City, Bogotá, Sydney, and London produced lasting memories of life onboard the ocean liners and tramp steamers that ferried him between these places as a boy and young man. 

His diverse background informed his vision of urban planning as a conciliatory practice of listening and learning between constituencies and professionals. He understood all of the world’s cities as neighborhoods of a single global village — as shared places of possibility, and of messy meaning, that transcended false notions of order and border.

“John’s legacy is all around us,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “His influence is reflected every day through our classes and research, in our passion to serve the world, and in the thoughtful, caring, and supportive community that is a hallmark of SA+P.”

As dean, de Monchaux was known for his ability to nurture dialogue, to forge consensus, and to build bridges between SA+P and other schools at the Institute. He achieved major milestones in the school’s history, including the completion of the award-winning Rotch Library extension in Building 7, the establishment of the Center for Real Estate (the first program of its kind in the United States), and the opening — in the newly-designed I.M. Pei building — of the Media Lab, an endeavor that de Monchaux was proud to have named after many wordier and narrower possibilities were considered.

After stepping down as dean in 1992, de Monchaux took a four-year partial leave from MIT to serve as general manager of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, a Geneva-based foundation concerned with architecture and urban design as a catalyst for cultural and social development in the Muslim world.

In 1996, he returned to MIT and spent the next dozen years teaching in two departments: Urban Studies and Planning and Architecture. From 1996 until 2004, he served as head of the Special Program in Urban Regional Studies (SPURS), a one-year program designed for mid-career professionals from developing countries.

“He helped many of us, faculty and students alike, to design better cities,” says DUSP department head Eran Ben-Joseph, who worked with de Monchaux in the department. “He was a true friend, mentor, and colleague — a person of genuine integrity, great wisdom, and a gentle soul who will be sorely missed.”

De Monchaux was also a dedicated presence in the Boston design community, serving on the boards of the Boston Society of Architects and the Boston Architectural College, and founding the Boston Civic Design Commission as well as serving as its first chair. He was a trustee of the Boston Foundation for Architecture, and a trustee and overseer of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, to a French-Australian family, de Monchaux was educated at St John’s College of the University of Sydney in Australia, and at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where later, in 1971, he would become a member of that school’s second class of Loeb Fellows. He began his teaching career at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College, London, in 1964, the beginning of what would become a long collaboration with then-professor Lord Richard Llewellyn-Davies.

De Monchaux had been admitted to MIT’s bachelor’s in architecture program in 1954 from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, but was unable to afford the tuition and enroll as a student. He returned to MIT in 1981 with a particular dedication to opening the Institute’s doors ever wider.

With his wife, British sociologist Suzanne de Monchaux, as part of the design team, he was principal planner for Milton Keynes, a new city in Buckinghamshire, England, that was conceived in the late 1960s as the crowning achievement of Great Britain’s utopian postwar New Towns Movement. In more than two decades of practice as a planner, primarily with global planning partnership Llewellyn Davies and its successor firms, he played a leading role in advocacy design assistance in Watts, Detroit, and Chicago. He also participated in urban plans and environmental impact studies throughout Australia, China, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, with a particular interest in the developing world, vernacular typologies, and informal urbanisms.

De Monchaux is survived by his twin sons: Nicholas de Monchaux, an associate professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California at Berkeley and a founding partner of the interdisciplinary architecture firm modem; and Thomas de Monchaux, an author, designer, and adjunct assistant professor of architecture at Columbia University.

For a story published in 2007 in PLAN on the occasion of de Monchaux’s nominal retirement from teaching, Lois Craig, who served as associate dean, recalled, “He had a method of getting agreement from people, forming friendships and professional alliances that supported his policies. He created a sense of functional togetherness. He was a conciliator and an enabler, bringing people together.”

In that same article, Professor Julian Beinart, who co-taught many urban design studios with de Monchaux, reflected on his colleague’s studio technique: “John always took the epistemologically cool position: Let’s think about your proposition, let’s untie the knots of your argument, to the extent we can, let’s see if we can reframe some of the parts, let’s see where that takes us.”

A memorial service will be held at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 29, in the MIT Chapel. 

Samuel W. Bodman III ScD ’65, a former MIT associate professor and life member emeritus of the MIT Corporation, who served as the U.S. Secretary of Energy and in other cabinet posts, died on Sept. 7 in El Paso, Texas, after a long illness. He was 79.

Bodman, who earned his doctoral degree from MIT in chemical engineering, served as Secretary of Energy in the George W. Bush administration from 2005 to 2009, after being unanimously confirmed by the Senate. He had previously served as Deputy Secretary of Treasury and Deputy Secretary of Commerce. Bush said in a prepared statement, “Laura and I are deeply saddened by the death of Sam Bodman. Sam had a brilliant mind, and we are fortunate that he put his intellect to work for our country as Secretary of Energy. I am proud that he was a member of my cabinet, and I am proud that he was my friend.”

“Sam led an extraordinary life of leadership and service in business, academia, and government. MIT was the very fortunate beneficiary of his time, talent, and wisdom in so many different capacities over the years. We are saddened by his loss but grateful for his impact on the Institute and well beyond,” says Robert Millard, chair of the MIT Corporation.

Bodman was born in Chicago in 1938 and earned his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University in 1961. He then earned his ScD in chemical engineering at MIT in 1965, where he then began a six-year stint as an associate professor. He later became a station director of what is now called the David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice, and he served on a landmark commission on the future of MIT education. He became a member of the MIT Corporation, the Institute’s governing body, and served on its Executive and Investment Committees, ultimately becoming a lifetime trustee.

He also served on the boards of Cornell University, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the New England Aquarium, and the Carnegie Institution for Science. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

His family recalls that a favorite saying of his was, “Every day is another opportunity to excel,” which he liked to say every morning, according to his stepdaughter Caroline Greene.

After leaving MIT, Bodman was technical director of the American Research and Development Corporation, an early venture capital firm, and from there went to Fidelity Venture Associates. He was appointed president and COO of Fidelity Investments in 1983, and also became director of the Fidelity Group of Mutual Funds.

In 1987, he moved to the Cabot Corporation to serve as chairman and CEO, where he served until joining the Bush administration in 2001. “His mind is extraordinarily creative and innovative. He has an ability to see things in a very broad and yet comprehensive way,” Kennett F. Burnes, who worked with Bodman at Cabot and succeeded him as the company’s chief executive, told The Boston Globe at the time of his appointment to be energy secretary.

Though he was born in Chicago and had homes in Florida and Texas as well as Martha’s Vineyard, Bodman remained an avid lifelong fan of the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots, his family says. Even during his eight years in Washington, “he made it very plain that those were his most favorite teams,” says his wife Diane Bodman.

Reflecting on his lifelong association with MIT, first as a student, then a professor, and finally a Corporation member, Mrs. Bodman says that “he loved MIT. He thought it was the finest institution in the world of its kind. He felt MIT really changed his life.”

Part of that, she says, was that it gave him “an approach to problems which encouraged a fact-based and insightful view of a problem, whether it was a problem in thermodynamics or a practical life problem.”

“He was a very intense person — he did everything with intensity,” Greene says. “He was a remarkable force in everything he did, both in his professional and personal life.”

Mrs. Bodman adds that “he found humor in most things, most situations. He was always quick to laugh.” Although he enjoyed fly fishing and loved his dogs, “he wasn’t a man who had hobbies. Sam’s favorite activity was work,” she says.

One thing he particularly enjoyed, she says, was “mentoring young people,” whether they were younger workers in the Department of Energy or entrepreneurs he worked with in his venture capital endeavors. “He encouraged thoughtful risk-taking,” she says. “He was a motivator.”

Mrs. Bodman adds that over the years, many of those young people returned to tell him “my life was changed by you.” They would say that lessons they learned by observing the way he worked or ran meetings were something they “carried over into their professional lives, and things they learned from his leadership style they have tried to use in their own careers.”

“He brought out the best in everyone,” Greene adds. “He demanded the best, saw the best, and expected no less from everyone, including himself.”

Bodman is survived by his wife M. Diane Bodman; three children, Elizabeth Mott, Andrew Bodman, and Sarah Greenhill; two step-children, Perry Barber and Caroline Greene; and a brother, James Bodman. His first wife, Elizabeth Little Bodman, died in 1982.

George Nicholas Hatsopoulos, an MIT mechanical engineering senior lecturer emeritus who founded the Thermo Electron Corporation has passed away at the age of 91. Hatsopoulos '49, SM '50, ME '54, SCD '56 served as a life member emeritus of the MIT Corporation. In 1996, he received The John Fritz Medal which is often regarded as the highest honor in engineering.

Born in Athens, Greece, in 1927, Hatsopoulos demonstrated his ingenuity at a young age. Inspired by his many relatives who were engineers, he made an image projector using cellophane and light at the age of 6. He spent his early childhood enamored with Thomas Edison’s research and devoted much of his youth to studying Edison’s work.

Hatsopoulos was a junior in high school in 1942 when Nazis occupied Greece. His family was forced to house Nazi officers in their home. Undeterred by the risks, Hatsopoulos built radios using parts he found in the junkyard and would listen to broadcasts about the Allied Forces’ efforts — an activity outlawed by the Nazis who lived upstairs.

Shortly thereafter, he studied at the National Technical University of Athens. He then moved to the United States to continue studying at MIT. He received his bachelor’s degree, master of science degree, master of engineering degree, and doctorate of science degree in mechanical engineering at MIT. His doctoral thesis, entitled “The thermo-electron engine”, focused on thermodynamics and informed one of the biggest milestones of his career — the founding of Thermo Electron Corporation.

Upon graduating with his doctorate in 1956, Hatsopoulos joined the faculty in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. That same year, along with Peter Nomikos, he co-founded the Thermo Electron Corporation.

In a March 2016 interview for the MIT Infinite History Project, Hatsopoulos explained his philosophy when starting Thermo Electron. “My concept of a technology company is … have a group of outstanding people and then look around [and ask] what is an emerging need that society has?” he said. “See if you can find solutions to that and dedicate the company [to it], not only in any one business, but in the business of creating new businesses. That was my model.”

Hatsopoulos applied that philosophy after reading a New York Times article about heart disease in America. He was inspired to build a team within Thermo Electron devoted to developing the first artificial heart.

As CEO and Chairman of Thermo Electron, Hatsopoulos turned the company into a global leader in analytical and monitoring instruments. By the time he retired in 1999, Thermo Electron had over 24,000 employees in 23 countries and worked in industries ranging from medical devices and environmental systems to bomb detectors and biomass electric generation. In 2006, Thermo Electron merged with Fisher Scientific to form Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

While building Thermo Electron from the ground up, Hatsopoulos remained active within the MIT community. In 1962, he was named senior lecturer, a role he held until 1990. In the same interview with the MIT Infinite History Project, Hatsopoulos recalls a time when he was asked what he did for fun: “I said I teach, that’s my goal. I don’t like golf … but I like teaching, I have fun teaching.”

In addition to teaching, Hatsopoulos made major contributions to the field of thermodynamics throughout his career. In 1965, he published the seminal textbook, "Principles of General Thermodynamics," along with "Thermionic Energy Conversion Volume I" and "Thermionic Energy Conversion Volume II" in the 1970s. In 1976, he contributed to a pioneering formulation of a unified theory of mechanics and thermodynamics, which is viewed as a precursor of the emerging field of quantum thermodynamics.

Hatsopoulos served on a number of boards including the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Governing Council of the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Bureau of Economic Research, just to name a few. He was a fellow of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Throughout his illustrious career in both academia and industry, Hatsopoulos was celebrated with numerous awards. In addition to The John Fritz Medal, he was named a commander of the Order of Honor in Greece and was named inventor of the year by the Boston Museum of Science in 1990.

Even after retiring from teaching in 1990, MIT remained an integral part of Hatsopoulos’ life. He was made a life member emeritus of the MIT Corporation. His daughter Marina received her master’s degree in mechanical engineering (MechE) at MIT in 1993, the same year she married his former student Walter Bornhorst, who received his PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT. Hatsopoulos’ granddaughter is a current MechE student.

Bernard F. “Bernie” Burke’50, PhD ’53, the William A.M. Burden Professor of Astrophysics Emeritus and a principal investigator at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, was an innovator whose research into radio astronomy stretched our view into the farthest reaches of the universe. He passed away on Aug. 5 at age 90.

A former chair of the Department of Physics’ Astrophysics Division, Burke's most notable achievements included the discovery of decametric radio noise from Jupiter — for which he earned the 1963 Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society — and the first Einstein Ring, the deformation of light in the form of a ring around a massive cosmic object due to gravitational lensing. He played a key role in developing very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), which allows high-resolution imaging of cosmic structures, and the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, to aid in his research of gravitational lenses, quasars, and galaxies. Burke is the co-author, along with Francis Graham-Smith, of “Introduction to Radio Astronomy,” now in its 3rd edition. 

“Those of us who have been here a while remember many decades of his humor, energy, intellect, and zest for life,” says Jacqueline Hewitt, director of the MIT Kavli Institute and one of 19 students mentored by Burke. “This is a great personal loss for me, and I know many at MKI who were close to him share my sorrow.” 

A longtime resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bernard Flood Burke was born in Brighton, Massachuetts, on June 7, 1928. His father Vincent was head of the math department at Rindge Technical High School. His mother Clare was a statistical typist who devised her own method to manually type complex math formulas.

When he was young, he would sit for hours doing math problems. At 16, he and a high school friend purchased a large piece of glass to grind it into a telescope’s lens. “They enjoyed the challenge involved to shape it and grind it correctly,” says his sister, Sally Berenson.

After graduating from Lexington High School, he turned down a major conservatory’s full scholarship to study the violin, and chose to study at MIT. With the Cold War was starting, he joined the ROTC’s Signal Corps, where he learned Russian, worked under a decryption specialist, and was promoted to first lieutenant. He also worked on Project Hartwell, a U.S. Navy-MIT collaboration that researched long-range underwater acoustic detection sensors for anti-submarine warfare.

He received his PhD in 1953, studying physics and astrophysics, with a focus on microwave spectroscopy, and joined the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM), as a radio astronomer. He designed and constructed radio interferometers, radiometers, and radio telescopes under DTM director Merle Tuve.

In 1955, he and his colleague Kenneth Franklin set out to map the northern sky using a radio antenna array, with receivers in the rural 96-acre Mills Cross field, near Washington. One night they heard a hissing sound they thought was from a passing vehicle. But when they tested the array and moved it in a southern direction, they detected bursts of radio radiation and realized that they had actually been listening to Jupiter. This was the first detection of non-thermal radio noise from a planet, and led to a new way of exploring the Solar System.

“Suddenly we realized we could start to learn about planets too,” says Jim Thieman of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The discovery earned Burke the Warner Prize.

Burke's other achievements at DTM included directing the instrumentation of its 60-foot radio telescope; conducting studies of 21-cm line hydrogen radiation from the Milky Way Galaxy; transporting a multichannel receiver to a 300-foot radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) at Cornell University; studying the velocity disruption of interstellar hydrogen in the Andromeda Galaxy; and helping discover tidal distortion of the galaxy.

Burke served as chair of DTM’s Radio Astronomy Section from 1962 to 1965. Later, he was a member of DTM’s visiting committee in 1994 and its first Merle A. Tuve Senior Fellow in 1997.

Back to MIT

In 1965, he joined MIT as a professor of physics with tenure, and as a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He served as chair of the Astrophysics Division from 1970 to 1983, and was named the William A.M. Burden Professor of Astrophysics in 1981.

“One of his defining characteristics was his huge level of energy and enthusiasm, and his focus on science,“ said Claude Canizares, the Bruno B. Rossi Professor of Physics and associate director of the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center.

Burke joined Professor Alan Barrett in the study of hydroxyl masers using telescopes at Millstone, Haystack Radio Observatory, and the Harvard Observatory. He directed the effort to link these telescopes to be used as interferometers. He showed that the angular sizes of the OH sources were so small that they could not be thermally excited and had to be naturally occurring masers. In 1967, this inteferometry work led to the development of VLBI, in a joint effort with NRAO and Canada’s National Research Council. 

VLBI used atomic frequency standards to synchronize pairs of radio telescopes around the world to study quasars and hydroxyl‐line emitters with an angular resolution 1,000 times better than previous methods. For this achievement, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him and the other participants the Rumford Prize in 1971.

In 1967 his MIT group was the first to conduct intercontinental VLBI, and in 1970 the first to extend the technique to the 1.35-cm water vapor line, showing that water emission, like hydroxyl emission, came from what he called “extraordinarily energetic and compact sources.”

Burke led the first Russian-U.S. VLBI experiment to measure the angular size of H₂O masers, in 1971. Jim Moran, the Donald H. Menzel Professor of Astrophysics Emeritus at Harvard University, recalled conspiring with Burke to carry a live atomic clock on a flight from Paris to Moscow.

“This was necessary in the Cold War days, and long before the GPS era, in order to synchronize the station clock at the telescope in Russia with its counterpart at the U.S. telescope to an accuracy of better than a microsecond," Moran recalls. “It was a real swashbuckling adventure."

In 1970, Burke began a campaign to extend VLBI methods into space. He was a major participant in the first three successful VLBI space missions where orbiting radio telescopes operated with arrays of telescopes on the ground to produce images of radio sources of unprecedented resolution: The connection of the TDRSS satellite into a ground-based network in the late 1980s, the Japanese-led VSOP/Halca project launched in 1997, and the Russian-led RadioAstron project launched in 2011 and still operating.  

Burke participated in an MIT group that helped develop the Very Large Array (VLA), at the time the largest, most expensive ground-based astronomical instrument ever built when it was completed in 1980. He used the VLA to study gravitational lenses.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted that massive objects could bend light rays passing nearby. The first example of this gravitational lensing effect outside the solar system was found in 1979, when Burke made this a major focus of his research. His team used the VLA to measure the time delay between components of the first known lensing object, 0957+561, to estimate the value of the Hubble Constant, which characterizes the age of the universe. Einstein suggested that if a bright object were positioned precisely behind a massive body, then a perfectly symmetric form of lensing would be produced; however, he predicted that such an event would be highly unlikely. Nonetheless, Burke, Hewitt, and others discovered this effect in 1988, which is now referred to by scientists as an “Einstein ring.” Teaming up with scientists from Princeton University and Caltech, they conducted a huge search for additional Einstein rings with the VLA and created an archive of more than 400 maps from the survey. At the NRAO, he led a series of MIT-Green Bank 5-GHz surveys that compiled thousands of radio sources in the sky using the 300-foot Green Bank telescope in West Virginia and detected gravitational lenses.

As a professor, he challenged his students on and off campus before retiring in the mid-1990s.

“Bernie was my PhD advisor, and he taught me many things,” recalls Hewitt. “Radio astronomy of course, but also sort of how to sail (we did capsize on occasion), and most importantly his superlatively positive approach to life I believe rubbed off on me a bit.”   

In recent years he continued to attend division and department events, scientific talks, and coffees. As a member of the National Academy of Science and several of its committees, he guided National Science Foundation and NASA funding for the astrophysics community. He was appointed to the National Science Board by President George H.W. Bush and continued to serve under President Barack Obama, and participated on a NASA committee that reviewed the history and future of space travel. At NASA, he was chair of the Toward Other Planetary Systems Science Working Group, and was a member on its Astronomy Missions Board, Physical Sciences Committee, and the Space Science Advisory Committee. He held leadership and editorial positions on many astronomy-focused councils and societies.

Princeton Astrophysics Professor Neta A. Bahcall calls him “one of the giants of astrophysics — a pioneering radio astronomer whose research has extended over many topics.

"The astronomical community lost a star,” says Bahcall, though his work lives on. “His scientific legacy will continue to shine.” 

He is survived by his wife Elizabeth “Betsy” Platt; his sister Sarah “Sally” Berenson; his daughter, Elizabeth Kahn, and her husband, Cory; two sons, Mark and Matt, and Matt’s wife, Sarah; eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild; Betsy’s children Will Balliett, Blue Balliett, and Julie Rose; and her eight grandchildren. He was predeceased by his first wife, Jane Pann Burke, his son Geoffrey, and his sister Clare Molloy. A funeral mass was held Aug. 11 at St. Paul’s in Cambridge.

There will be a memorial for Professor Burke at the MIT Chapel on Nov. 10 at 3 p.m., followed by a reception.

In lieu of flowers, gifts may be made to MIT, in memory of Bernard Burke, to support the Alumni Fellowship Fund in Physics #2738023. Checks may be made payable to MIT and mailed to: Memorial Gifts Office, 600 Memorial Drive, W98-500, Cambridge, MA 02139.    

More information about Burke’s life is available at the Department of Physics website.

“Flying with Colt above glaciers and between mountain peaks, I understood how he fell in love with flying, and why he was so excited to share that with others.”

Sam Parker ’15 wrote that about his late friend and classmate Colt Richter ’16. He added that Richter, who died this past July when the small plane he was piloting crashed in Alaska, relished service above all else and often refused to claim credit or recognition, “as his humility wouldn't allow it.”

Another close companion, MIT alumnus Dylan Soukup ’14, echoed such a sentiment, writing that Richter had “a love of helping others, a passion for selflessness” and a deep connection to the breathtaking natural beauty of his native state of Alaska. As a newly arrived first-year student, Richter said in an interview for MIT News that one of the things he anticipated missing most about his home was the view.

“I can look out my window and see mountains,” said Richter, who went on to earn a degree in mechanical engineering. “In Boston, it’s really, really flat.”

Judging by how he embraced his time on and around campus, Richter managed to adjust to the more linear landscape. He joined the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity, sung in the Ohms a cappella group, and served as a volunteer emergency medical technician for MIT EMS. He served on MIT’s student-run ambulance service during all four of his years on campus, and as a junior he became the chief and built close ties to members of the MIT Police.

Richter also served as a student member of the Presidential Advisory Cabinet. MIT President L. Rafael Reif expressed fond memories, saying “Colt was one of the most exceptional students to serve.”

“He was thoughtful, warm, and wise, and he cared deeply about MIT's students,” President Reif said. “As we mourn Colt's tragic loss, we are grateful for the time he spent on our campus. He was a special young man, and he made all of MIT better and stronger.”

Richter had planned to put all of his MIT experiences to good use, as he had long expressed a dream of becoming an orthopedic surgeon. He had been accepted to medical school at the University of Washington and was due to start this past August. Richter spent the past two gap years flying commercially throughout Alaska.

His passion for aviation is hard to overstate. All of his friends commented that he was most comfortable in the air and made those with him equally so.

Richter received his pilot’s license at just 17, allowing him, said close friend and fellow aviation enthusiast Matt Guthmiller ’18, to “fly a wider variety of airplanes and in more diverse environments in 24 years than many pilots do in a lifetime.” Not surprisingly, he even taught a flying class at MIT.

Flying was a family affair too, as Richter’s father flew as did his grandfather, who was a fighter pilot in World War II prior to becoming a commercial airline pilot. When Richter was not in the air, he was exploring all the places travel could take him, enjoying hiking in the remote outdoors as well as fishing, skiing, or skydiving. 

As busy as he was — Guthmiller noted his classmate’s talent playing piano, guitar, and singing — Richter made finding time for others his greatest priority.

“He was the kind of person who, despite keeping extremely busy, was never too busy for friends or family,” Guthmiller said. “He cared deeply about the people around him, took care of them, had a tremendous amount of fun, and simply made you want to be a better person.”

Tom Troxel, a lifelong Alaskan friend who considered Richter a brother, conveyed the value his friend placed on family.

“We lived at each other’s houses and in the summers, we would sneak off to our cabins every chance we could. Whether we were debating constitutional law or getting up to no good at Big Lake, Colt always knew how to put a smile on my face and he always had a big grin spread across his,” Troxel said. “He was part of my family and I was part of his. After graduating from MIT, Colt came back to Alaska, partially so he could fly full-time but more importantly so he could spend more time with his dad and mom. I remember talking to him so many times since he moved back home about how important it was for him to be in Alaska with them — he loved Cathy and Rick so very much.”

In the words of his parents, Cathy and Rick Richter: “Colt was our only child and the perfect son to us. We miss him deeply and are so appreciative of the loving support we have received throughout this difficult time.”

Richter, at once grounded and in the clouds, carved out a path for others to follow. His parents noted that dozens of those who knew him whether near or far, did not hesitate to come to Alaska for the service and celebration of his life. For all of his talent, drive, and interests, a simple wish from those who loved him said it all: “Fly high my friend.”

A celebration of life event, led by MIT Reverend Kristin Boswell-Ford, will take place on campus on Nov. 16.

The Colt Richter (2016) Scholarship Fund has been established by Colt’s parents at MIT. Gifts may be made on-line using the following link: https://giving.mit.edu/colt-richter. Checks, payable to MIT, may be sent to: MIT Office of Memorial Gifts, 600 Memorial Drive Room W98-526, Cambridge MA 02139. Questions about gifts may be directed to Bonny Kellermann at 617-253-9722 or bonnyk@mit.edu.

Professor Emeritus Sylvain Bromberger, a philosopher of language and of science who played a pivotal role in establishing MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, died on Sept. 16 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 94.

A faculty member for more than 50 years, Bromberger helped found the department in 1977 and headed the philosophy section for several years. He officially retired in 1993 but remained very active at MIT until his death.

Kindness and intellectual generosity

“Although he officially retired 25 years ago, Sylvain was an active and valued member of the department up to the very end,” said Alex Byrne, head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. “He made enduring contributions to philosophy and linguistics, and his colleagues and students were frequent beneficiaries of his kindness and intellectual generosity. He had an amazing life in so many ways, and MIT is all the better for having been a part of it.”

Paul Egré, director of research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (aka CNRS) and a former visiting scholar at MIT, said, “Those of us who were lucky enough to know Sylvain have lost the dearest of friends, a unique voice, a distinctive smile and laugh, someone who yet seemed to know that life is vain and fragile in unsuspected ways, but also invaluable in others.”

Enduring contribution to fundamental issues about knowledge

Bromberger’s work centered largely on fundamental issues in epistemology, namely the theory of knowledge and the conditions that make knowledge possible or impossible. During the course of his career, he devoted a substantial part of his thinking to an examination of the ways in which we come to apprehend unsolved questions. His research in the philosophy of linguistics, carried out in part with the late Institute Professor Morris Halle of the linguistics section, included investigations into the foundations of phonology and of morphology.

Born in 1924 in Antwerp to a French-speaking Jewish family, Bromberger escaped the German invasion of Belgium with his parents and two brothers on May 10, 1940. After reaching Paris, then Bordeaux, his family obtained one of the last visas issued by the Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes in Bayonne. Bromberger later dedicated the volume of his collected papers "On What We Know We Don’t Know: Explanation, Theory, Linguistics, and How Questions Shape Them" (University of Chicago Press, 1992) to Sousa Mendes.

The family fled to New York, and Bromberger was admitted to Columbia University. However, he chose to join the U.S. Army in 1942, and he went on to serve three years in the infantry. He took part in the liberation of Europe as a member of the 405th Regiment, 102nd Infantry Division. He was wounded during the invasion of Germany in 1945.

After leaving the Army, Bromberger studied physics and the philosophy of science at Columbia University, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1948. He received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1961.
 
Research and teaching at MIT

He served on the philosophy faculties at Princeton University and at the University of Chicago before joining MIT in 1966. Over the years, he trained many generations of MIT students, teaching alongside such notables as Halle, Noam Chomsky, Thomas Kuhn, and Ken Hale.

In the early part of his career, Bromberger focused on critiquing the so-called deductive-nomological model of explanation, which says that to explain a phenomenon is to deductively derive the statement reporting that phenomenon from laws (universal generalizations) and antecedent conditions. For example, we can explain that this water boils from the law that all water boils at 100 degrees C, and that the temperature of the water was elevated to exactly 100 C.

An influential article: Why-questions

One simple though key observation made by Bromberger in his analysis was that we may not only explain that the water boils at 100 C, but also how it boils, and even why it boils when heated up. This feature gradually led Bromberger to think about the semantics and pragmatics of questions and their answers.

Bromberger’s 1966 “Why-questions” paper was probably his most influential article. In it, he highlights the fact that most scientifically valid questions put us at first in a state in which we know all actual answers to the question to be false, but in which we can nevertheless recognize the question to have a correct answer (a state he calls “p-predicament,” with “p” for “puzzle”). According to Bromberger, why-questions are particularly emblematic of this state of p-predicament, because in order to ask a why-question rationally, a number of felicity conditions (or presuppositions) must be satisfied, which are discussed in his work.

The paper had an influence on ulterior accounts of explanation, notably Bas van Fraassen’s discussion of the semantic theory of contrastivism in his book "The Scientific Image" (to explain a phenomenon is to answer a why-question with a contrast class in mind). Still today, why-questions are recognized as questions whose semantics is hard to specify, in part for reasons Bromberger discussed.

In addition to investigating the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analysis of interrogatives, Bromberger also immersed himself in generative linguistics, with a particular interest in generative phonology, and the methodology of linguistic theory, teaching a seminar on the latter with Thomas Kuhn.

A lifelong engagement with new ideas

In 1993, the MIT Press published a collection of essays in linguistics to honor Bromberger on the occasion of his retirement. "The View From Building 20," edited by Ken Hale and Jay Keyser, featured essays by Chomsky, Halle, Alec Marantz, and other distinguished colleagues.

In 2017, Egré and Robert May put together a workshop honoring Bromberger at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Talks there centered on themes from Bromberger’s work, including metacognition, questions, linguistic theory, and problems concerning word individuation.

Tributes were read, notably this one from Chomsky, who used to take walks with Bromberger when they taught together:

“Those walks were a high point of the day for many years … almost always leaving me with the same challenging question: Why? Which I’ve come to think of as Sylvain’s question. And leaving me with the understanding that it is a question we should always ask when we have surmounted some barrier in inquiry and think we have an answer, only to realize that we are like mountain climbers who think they see the peak but when they approach it find that it still lies tantalizingly beyond.”

Egré noted that even when Bromberger was in his 90s, he had a “constant appetite for new ideas. He would always ask what your latest project was about, why it was interesting, and how you would deal with a specific problem,” Egré said. “His hope was that philosophy, linguistics, and the brain sciences would eventually join forces to uncover unprecedented dimensions of the human mind, erasing at least some of our ignorance.”

Bromberger’s wife of 64 years, Nancy, died in 2014. He is survived by two sons, Allen and Daniel; and three grandchildren, Michael Barrows, Abigail Bromberger, and Eliza Bromberger.
 

Written by Paul Egré and Kathryn O’Neill, with contributions from Daniel Bromberger, Allen Bromberger, Samuel Jay Keyser, Robert May, Agustin Rayo, Philippe Schlenker, and Benjamin Spector