Dana G. Mead PhD ’67, a prominent business leader, military officer, former White House official, and professor who served as chair of the MIT Corporation from 2003 until 2010, died on Oct. 31 in Boston.

Mead was a forward-looking leader at MIT who helped oversee a period of significant advancement, as the Institute expanded its research interests and took landmark steps to diversify the campus community, while remaining at the leading edge of engineering, science, and innovation.

During Mead’s tenure as the Corporation’s ninth chair, MIT broadened its research portfolio to include increased investment in the life sciences, and launched new centers such as the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). The Institute also grew its international research programs and global engagement, and, under Mead’s supervision, hired its first female president, Susan Hockfield, who was also the first life scientist to hold the position. 

"When Dana Mead chaired the MIT Corporation, I was provost, so I had the immense privilege of learning from his wonderful leadership style and observing his intense commitment to sustaining MIT’s excellence, especially through bringing fresh perspectives to the Visiting Committees,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “He understood as well as anyone that the Institute is a system — and that the quality of our Visiting Committees drives the quality of the whole enterprise. MIT continues to reap the benefits of his insight and thoughtful service.”

Hockfield also recalls Mead’s impact at the Institute: “I had the very great fortune to have Dana Mead at my side, as chair of the MIT Corporation, when I embarked on my service as MIT’s president,” she says. “Dana advised and encouraged me, generously sharing the prodigious wisdom he had gained over the course of a lifetime of service and leadership. He quickly became my trusted advisor. Dana deftly but unambiguously established lines of governance, strengthening the roles of both the Corporation and Institute leadership, to MIT’s great benefit.”

Additionally, Hockfield says, Mead’s personal qualities were an integral part of his leadership style.

“But even while Dana instructed us, he also amused us,” Hockfield says. “When a discussion had gone on too long, he often observed, ‘Everything has been said, but not everyone has had a chance to say it.’ With his wisdom and warmth, and his discipline and depth of curiosity, Dana Mead devotedly served MIT.”

As one product of Mead’s focus on diversity, the number of women serving as Corporation members grew by around 50 percent during his tenure, while representation by foreign members also increased by nearly 50 percent.

In 2009, Mead announced he would step aside as chairperson, in keeping with the Corporation’s by-laws, which require that members do not serve past age 75.

“I will miss working in this very vibrant and dynamic environment — the students, faculty, administrators, alumni and the like,” he said at the time. Mead then became a Corporation life member, emeritus.

Dana George Mead was born in Cresco, Iowa. His long and diverse career in leadership roles included phases in the military, government, private sector, and academia. Mead graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1957 with a BS in engineering, and then served as an Army officer in many roles for over two decades, including assignments as a troop leader in Germany, and a combatant and strategist in Vietnam.

In 1967, Mead completed his PhD studies in MIT’s Department of Political Science, having been selected for a fellowship as an officer. His dissertation, “United States peacetime strategic planning, 1920-1941: the color plans to the victory program,” examined the ways the U.S. military planned for the “next war” in the years following World War I, until the start of World War II.

After completing his academic work, Mead transitioned to government positions, including a fellowship in the White House Fellows program. He wrote military reports, and later served as the White House’s deputy director of the Domestic Council during the Nixon administration. He left Washington in 1974 to take a professorship back at the United States Military Academy.

“Other than his wife of 60 years, Nancy, and his family, our dad was most passionate about his varied and longstanding relationships with three great American institutions; MIT, West Point, and the White House Fellows Program,” says Dana Mead Jr., one of Mead’s sons.

Mead then moved into the private sector, forging a highly successful career in industrial management. Notably, for most of the 1990s, he was chair and CEO of Tenneco Inc., the conglomerate with businesses in oil and gas transmission, shipbuilding, auto parts, packaging, chemicals, and more. Mead oversaw the expansion of Tenneco’s operations across the globe and a concurrent rise in productivity and profitability at the company.

Mead recounted and analyzed many of these experiences at Tenneco in his 2000 book, “High Standards, Hard Choices,” which frankly analyzed the his time in the executive suite and offered a look at his pragmatic style.

“There is no rocket science in quality management,” Mead wrote in the book. “Getting it right the first time, satisfying customers, reducing variations in process, and continually improving products is just common sense in business.”

At the same time, he wrote, “you will discover a lot of talent buried in the organization at all levels,” and allowing talent a chance to thrive is important. Such people, he adds, “not only know how to work the valves and switches in the middle of the night, but they probably have a lot of ideas on how to do it better. You have to put your ear to the ground and listen carefully to identify the people who are looked to and respected by their peers.”

As an extension of his corporate leadership roles, Mead served terms as chair of the National Association of Manufacturers from 1995 to 1997, and of the Business Roundtable from 1998 to 1999. He also served on the boards of Pfizer, Zurich, Textron, and Cummins.

Additionally, Mead was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, and was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He served on the board of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, the School for Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. He also served on the National Board of Governors for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, a long-time philanthropic interest.

Mead is survived by his wife, Nancy, as well as his two sons, Dana Jr. and Mark; his daughters-in-law D-Arcy and Susie; his brother, Michael, and sister-in-law, Anna; and seven grandsons.

Funeral services will be held at the Old Cadet Chapel at the West Point Cemetery, at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, at 10 a.m. on Nov. 20. Donations in his name can be made to the Boys and Girls Club of America.

To honor Mead’s memory, the flags on MIT’s Killian Court will fly at half-staff Nov. 13-16.

Professor Emerita Catherine Vakar Chvany, a renowned Slavic linguist and literature scholar who played a pivotal role in advancing the study of Russian language and literature in MIT’s Foreign Languages and Literatures Section (now Global Studies and Languages), died on Oct. 19 in Watertown, Massachusetts. She was 91.

Chvany served on the MIT faculty for 26 years before her retirement in 1993.

Global Studies and Languages head Emma Teng noted that MIT’s thriving Russian studies curriculum today is a legacy of Chvany’s foundational work in the department. And, Maria Khotimsky, senior lecturer in Russian, said, “Several generations of Slavists are grateful for Professor Chvany’s inspiring mentorship, while her works in Slavic poetics and linguistics are renowned in the U.S. and internationally.”

A prolific and influential scholar

A prolific scholar, Chvany wrote "On the Syntax of Be-Sentences in Russian" (Slavica Publishers, 1975); and co-edited four volumes: "New Studies in Russian Language and Literature" (Slavica, 1987); "Morphosyntax in Slavic" (Slavica, 1980); "Slavic Transformational Syntax" (University of Michigan, 1974); and "Studies in Poetics: Commemorative Volume: Krystyna Pomorska" (Slavica Publishers, 1995).

In 1996, linguists Olga Yokoyama and Emily Klenin published an edited collection of her work, "Selected Essays of Catherine V. Chvany" (Slavica).

In her articles, Chvany took up a range of issues in linguistics, including not only variations on the verb “to be” but also hierarchies of situations in syntax of agents and subjects; definiteness in Bulgarian, English, and Russian; other issues of lexical storage and transitivity; hierarchies in Russian cases; and issues of markedness, including an important overview, “The Evolution of the Concept of Markedness from the Prague Circle to Generative Grammar.”

In literature she took up language issues in the classic "Tale of Igor's Campaign," Teffi’s poems, Nikolai Leskov’s short stories, and a novella by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

From Paris to Cambridge 

“Catherine Chvany was always so present that it is hard to think of her as gone,” said MIT Literature Professor Ruth Perry. “She had strong opinions and wasn't afraid to speak out about them.”

Chvany was born on April 2, 1927, in Paris, France, to émigré Russian parents. During World War II, she and her younger sister Anna were sent first to the Pyrenees and then to the United States with assistance from a courageous young Unitarian minister’s wife, Martha Sharp.

Fluent in Russian and French, Chvany quickly mastered English. She graduated from the Girls’ Latin School in Boston in 1946 and attended Radcliffe College from 1946 to 1948. She left school to marry Lawrence Chvany and raise three children, Deborah, Barbara, and Michael.

In 1961-63, she returned to school and completed her undergraduate degree in linguistics at Harvard University. She received her PhD in Slavic languages and literatures from Harvard in 1970 and began her career as an instructor of Russian language at Wellesley College in 1966.

She joined the faculty at MIT in 1967 and became an assistant professor in 1971, an associate professor in 1974, and a full professor in 1983.

Warmth, generosity, and friendship

Historian Philip Khoury, who was dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences during the latter years of Chvany’s time at MIT, remembered her warmly as “a wonderful colleague who loved engaging with me on language learning and how the MIT Russian language studies program worked.”

Elizabeth Wood, a professor of Russian history, recalled the warm welcome that Chvany gave her when she came to MIT in 1990: “She always loved to stop and talk at the Tuesday faculty lunches, sharing stories of her life and her love of Slavic languages.”

Chvany’s influence was broad and longstanding, in part as a result of her professional affiliations. Chvany served on the advisory or editorial boards of "Slavic and East European Journal,""Russian Language Journal,""Journal of Slavic Linguistics,""Peirce Seminar Papers,""Essays in Poetics" (United Kingdom), and "Supostavitelno ezikoznanie" (Bulgaria).

Emily Klenin, an emerita professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, noted that Chvany had a practice of expressing gratitude to those whom she mentored. She connected that practice to Chvany’s experience of being aided during WWII. “Her warm and open attitude toward life was reflected in her continuing interest and friendship for the young people she mentored, even when, as most eventually did, they went on to lives involving completely different academic careers or even no academic career at all,” Klenin said.

Memorial reception at MIT on November 18

Chvany is survived by her children, Deborah Gyapong and her husband Tony of Ottawa, Canada; Barbara Chvany and her husband Ken Silbert of Orinda, California; and Michael Chvany and his wife Sally of Arlington, Massachusetts; her foster-brother, William Atkinson of Cambridge, Massachusetts; six grandchildren; and nine great grandchildren.

A memorial reception will be held on Sunday, Nov. 18, from 1:30 to 4:00 p.m. in the Samberg Conference Center, 7th floor. Donations in Chvany’s name may be made to the Unitarian Universalist Association. Visit Friends of the UUA for online donations. Please RSVP to Michael Chvany, Mike@BridgeStreetProductions.com, if you plan to attend the memorial.

Alan L. McWhorter, a longtime professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and an administrator and researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, has died in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was 87.

His family said his death was unexpected despite some recent health problems. A memorial service will be held at a later date.

McWhorter is best known for his research in electronic and quantum devices including transistors, lasers, and masers. In 1955, he developed the McWhorter model for low-frequency flicker (or 1/f) noise caused by surface effects in semiconductor devices. The model, sometimes called “the McWhorter effect,” continues to be widely cited today. In the mid-1960s, he received three patents related to semiconductors.

However, according to MIT colleague Paul Penfield Jr., his range of interests was broader and extended in many dimensions. “Al’s lesser-known but still pioneering work included aspects of control systems, power semiconductors, infrared detection, and optical communications,” said Penfield, an emeritus professor and former EECS department head. “But besides his technical breadth, he understood both the theoretical and experimental sides of engineering, cared about both the pedagogy and applications of various technologies, and promoted short-term applied research along with long-range curiosity-driven research.”

Long legacy at MIT

Born in Crowley, Louisiana, on Aug. 25, 1930, McWhorter began his education in New Orleans at Tulane University’s School of Engineering, then transferred to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, receiving a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1951. He received an ScD degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1955.

McWhorter joined the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering as an assistant professor in 1959, served as an associate professor from 1960 to 1966, and as a full professor until he retired in 1996. During his time with EE (now EECS), he supervised more than 30 students’ work on their master’s, PhD, and ScD theses. With a generous donation, he established a fellowship fund, the Alan L. McWhorter (1955) Fund, to support graduate students studying electrical engineering

McWhorter was also affiliated with the Solid State Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory for more than 40 years, beginning as a staff member in 1955. He served as assistant division head and associate head between 1962 and 1965, when he was named to head the division. He served as division head for 29 years, becoming a Lincoln Laboratory Fellow in 1994 and retiring in 1996.

“Al was a warm, generous, and inspiring colleague,” recalled Erich Ippen, a principal investigator at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and a professor emeritus of both electrical engineering and physics. “As an early leader in quantum electronics, he was a valuable mentor for us younger researchers in that area on campus as well as at Lincoln Lab.” 

Frederick Leonberger knew McWhorter in both MIT roles. “I had the good fortune of having Al as my doctoral thesis advisor. His insightful guidance and high standards not only inspired me in my research, but also provided an excellent model for conducting and managing the research process,” said Leonberger, who is now a principal with EOvation Advisors. “At Lincoln Laboratory, where I subsequently worked, his leadership — as well as the range of research topics he had expertise in and contributed to — provided a role model of technical excellence for the staff, and helped enable the many important technical achievements of the division over the years.”

Many MIT colleagues still recall that, in 1969, McWhorter was involved in a near-fatal collision in Arlington, Massachusetts, sustaining a skull fracture, a concussion, eye and facial injuries, and many broken bones. But four months later, after seven operations and multiple setbacks, he walked out of Massachusetts General Hospital, returning to work at MIT soon after. He also returned to hiking and mountain-climbing, beginning with a trip to the Grand Tetons one year after his release from the hospital.

Patent particulars

McWhorter received his first two patents, both for semiconductor switching matrixes, in 1963 and 1964, at a time when researchers were experimenting with a variety of ways for using semiconductors in computers. The patents describe the development of the cryosar, one of the early semiconductor memory devices. Semiconductor memory (such as RAM) is now ubiquitous in electronics.

The third, and arguably most historically significant patent, came in 1966. It reflected McWhorter’s involvement as a member of one of three teams that had nearly simultaneously demonstrated the first semiconductor laser (then called an infrared maser). Today, semiconductor lasers are used in devices ranging from DVD players to laser pointers to printers to tattoo-removal devices.

Professional recognition

In 1958, McWhorter and two colleagues received the National Electronics Conference Annual Award for their technical paper on solid-state masers.

McWhorter was also a long-time member of the IEEE, a leading technical professional organization. In 1968, he was named an IEEE Fellow, a distinction reserved for select members with extraordinary accomplishments. The IEEE recognized McWhorter “for contributions to control theory and its applications to switch power systems and image processing.” In 1971, McWhorter received the IEEE David Sarnoff Award, which recognizes exceptional work in electronics, “for outstanding contributions leading to a better understanding of semiconductor devices.” In 2000, he won an IEEE Third Millennium Medal “for contributions to control theory and its applications to switch power systems and image processing.” He was one of just 45 members of the IEEE Electron Devices Society to be so honored.

In 1993, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for “outstanding research and technical leadership in the fields of quantum electronics and solid-state devices.” He was also a long-time fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of the scientific and engineering societies Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu (HKN).

McWhorter also authored or co-authored dozens of scientific articles and hundreds of reports, contributed to several books, and served as an editor on two IEEE publications.

Professor emeritus

After retiring in 1996, he returned to the New Orleans area and again began participating in Tulane activities, such as the Friends of Music, the Summer Lyric Theatre, and the Emeritus Club and Educational Conference offerings of the Alumni House. McWhorter, who died on July 11, 2018, is survived in the New Orleans area by niece Patricia McWhorter (Peter C. Broussard); nephews David McWhorter (Lisa) and Steven McWhorter (Renee), and six grandnieces: Olivia Broussard (Lucien Weiss);  Allyson McWhorter; Brindley McWhorter; Rebecca McWhorter Ruegge (Gene); Elizabeth McWhorter Guillory (Dakota); and Emily McWhorter Menendez (Colin). A private memorial service will be held in New Orleans at a later date.

Gifts in memory of Alan McWhorter may be made to MIT via the Alan L. McWhorter (1955) Fund, account #3304350. Credit-card gifts can be made at giving.mit.edu/alan-mcwhorter. Checks should be made payable to MIT and mailed to: MIT Memorial Gifts Office, 600 Memorial Drive, Room W98-500, Cambridge, MA 02139.

Ernst G. Frankel MME ’60, SM ‘60, professor emeritus of ocean engineering who served on MIT’s faculty for 36 years, passed away on Nov. 18 at the age of 95. Frankel, who was also a former professor of management at the Sloan School of Management, was a leading expert in shipping, shipbuilding, and port management.

Born in 1923 in Beuthen, Germany, Frankel served in the Royal Navy during World War II. He also served in the Israeli navy in 1948. After the war, he pursued his bachelor’s degree in marine engineering at London University. He worked for eight years as chief engineer of Zim Navigation Company in Israel, before moving to America and enrolling in MIT to study ocean engineering.

He graduated MIT in 1960 with a master’s of science in ocean engineering and a master’s of marine mechanical engineering. In his graduate thesis, he examined the effects of surge, pitch, and heave on semisubmerged displacement vessels in regular waves. After graduating, he joined the faculty of the then-named Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering. He remained on the faculty until his retirement in 1995.

Throughout his career, Frankel authored 21 books and over 700 academic papers. In 1971, he was named head of the Interdepartmental Commodity Transportation and Economic Development Laboratory, which he also helped establish.

In addition to his work at MIT, Frankel acted as an advisor to a number of governments, international organizations, and shipping companies. He was a member of the Board of Directors of Neptune Orient Lines, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, as well as an advisor to the Panama Canal Authority. He also served as a port, shipping, and aviation advisor to the World Bank, a senior advisor on ports to the secretary general of the International Maritime Organization, and a member of the U.N.-sponsored World Maritime University’s Visiting Committee.

Frankel received a number of accolades throughout his career including a Gold Medal from the government of Great Britain in 1956. He was also a member of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers and the Transportation Science Section Council.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Frankel expanded his expertise beyond ocean engineering and naval architecture, setting his sights on business and economics. He earned a master’s of business administration in operations management and a doctor of business administration in systems management from Boston University. He also received a PhD in transport economics from the University of Wales in 1985. 

This foundation in economics and business management led to a dual appointment in the Sloan School of Management. In addition to acting as professor of ocean engineering, in the early 1990s Frankel was named a professor of management at Sloan. 

After his retirement in 1995, Frankel remained active in both teaching and research. When Elon Musk announced the Hyperloop concept in 2013, Frankel received some unexpected media attention for research he conducted two decades prior. In the early 1990s, Frankel led a team that designed a vacuum tube which could possibly enable travel between Boston and New York City in 40 minutes — a concept similar to what Musk has been hoping to achieve.

In an interview with the BBC in 2014, Frankel said, “The advantage of a vacuum tube is that you can achieve high speeds. … We built a half-mile long tube at the playing fields of MIT, evacuated it, and then shot things through it in order to measure what sort of velocities we could obtain.”

Funeral services were held in Brookline, Massachusetts, on Nov. 20.

Lisa Peattie, a celebrated scholar and a lifelong activist who was a professor emerita of urban anthropology in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and recipient of the ACSP Distinguished Educator Award, passed away on Dec. 13, 2018. She was 94.

Peattie was born in Chicago and raised in Illinois, Mexico, and Guatemala. Her international upbringing amid her parents’ fieldwork in Morelos and Yucatán, Mexico, nurtured an early interest in the connections among academic disciplines.

She studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, earning her doctorate in 1968.

Peattie joined the MIT faculty in 1963 with the goal of pushing anthropology out of the realm of pure social science and into the arena of action and advocacy, by including the researcher’s moral positions and the interests of the individuals being studied. She was one of the first female faculty members to gain tenure at MIT.

In 1962 Peattie and her husband, Roderick Peattie, moved to South America to help document the efforts of the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies to plan a new city in the interior of Venezuela. Her experiences in the field and her observations of the difficulties faced by those living at the margins of the new city led to her pathbreaking book, “The View from the Barrio” (University of Michigan Press). The volume raised planners’ awareness of the way that the plans they imagined actually affected people at the margins.

“Lisa was an unorthodox urban anthropologist who strongly believed that governmental interventions in the lives of the urban poor usually reduce the autonomy of the poor,” says Bish Sanyal, the Ford Professor of Urban Development and Planning. “She came to this conclusion by living with the poor and by observing from below how poor families coped with socioeconomic changes.” 

Following the death of her husband in 1963, Peattie returned to Boston to teach full time at MIT. During her career at the Institute, Peattie remained a tenacious activist, protesting frequently against the Vietnam War during the 1960s and early 1970s, against nuclear proliferation in the 1980s and 1990s, and most recently as part of the Occupy movement in the early 2010s.

In 1966, she was part of the original group of students and faculty from MIT and Harvard that created Urban Planning Aid (UPA). This organization was the first advocacy planning firm in America. Peattie and her colleagues offered technical assistance and promoted empowerment in low-income communities faced with housing, health, safety, and representation challenges. UPA helped residents of Boston and Cambridge halt the proposed construction of the Inner Belt highway, fight evictions. and prevent the demolition of housing.

“Lisa was my professor at MIT in both the MCP program and later for my PhD,” says Anna Hardman MCP ’71, PhD ’88. “I learned so much from Lisa’s insight, ideas, and enthusiasm‚ and from her commitment to important causes‚ lessons I re-learned when I worked for Urban Planning Aid in the 1970s. Lisa was wise, always thoughtful, and her contribution to women in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning was vital.”

In 1999, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning presented Peattie with the profession’s highest teaching honor, its Distinguished Educator Award. The award recognized her scholarly accomplishments as well as the impact of her work as an applied anthropologist and activist.

Peattie raised four children: Christopher Peattie (husband of Denise Hood), who predeceased her in 2011; and Sara Peattie, Miranda Clemson, and Julia Peattie. She also leaves two grandchildren, Chris Clemson and Ella Beaver. She is survived by her brother, James Redfield, and his wife, Kathy Atlass.

“Widowed young in a foreign country with four children, our mother continued to approach life with zest and courage, traveling overland up the Pan-American Highway from Panama to New England in a Jeep with her children and a parrot,” say her daughters. “Our mother was a woman capable of enthralling a class of graduate students, planting a vegetable garden, baking bread, and painting the bedroom ceiling all in the same day. Often exasperating, she was never dull. She threw great parties and was a mean dancer. In later years her body flagged but her spirit, never. Her curiosity about the world never dimmed.”

János Miklós Beér, professor emeritus of chemical and fuel engineering and a pathbreaking researcher in the field of flames, combustion, and cleaner-burning fossil fuels, died peacefully on Dec. 8, in Winchester at the age of 95.

Beér served on the MIT faculty from 1976 to 1993, helping to launch the Combustion Research Facility as part of the Institute's Energy Laboratory. In 2003, U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham awarded him the Homer H. Lowry Award, the department's highest honor, for his work leading to commercial burners that achieved high efficiencies while minimizing noxious emissions such as nitrogen oxides.

“Dr. Beér has made pioneering research and development contributions for 45 years to combustion science and technology of coal, oil, and gaseous flames,” Abraham said at the award ceremony. “He has also been a major influence on industry through his publications and lectures to professionals at national and international meetings, his leadership with students on university campuses, and his service as a consultant to many power and utility companies both in the U.S. and abroad.”

Beér's early years in Central Europe unfolded against a backdrop of the 20th century's most tumultuous and violent episodes. Born on Feb. 27, 1923, in Budapest, Hungary, an only child to Jewish parents, he attended that city's University of Technical and Economic Sciences. But in April 1944, Beér was conscripted into the Hungarian army's labor battalion, and with the fascist Arrow Cross Party ascendant, he found himself in danger of deportation to Germany.

Then fate intervened: A friend of Beér's introduced him to the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who had arrived in Budapest with a plan to rescue Jews. Beér eagerly joined the effort, distributing Swedish passes to Jewish prisoners in railway cattle cars before they could be shipped to concentration camps, and then helping to ferry these people to safety in diplomatically protected houses. In testimony he left to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Beér said: "Wallenberg was very brave, but not reckless … and there was much solidarity in our group."

Beér remained with the Swedish legation until the end of the war, when he was able to reunite with his wife, Marta Gabriella Csato, whom he had married in October 1944. They remained married until her death in 2017. Resuming his education, he received a first class honors degree from József Nádor University of Technology in 1950, and became a research engineer at Budapest's Heat Research Institute, as well as a lecturer at Budapest Technical University.

Beér did not have long to enjoy his newly established professional life, however. When Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956 to put down the popular uprising against the Communist regime, he and his wife fled from the mass arrests. They landed as refugees in Scotland, where Beér found employment with Babcock and Wilcox Ltd. In 1957, the couple moved to England, and soon Beér was completing his doctorate at the University of Sheffield. After receiving his PhD in 1960, Beér took a position with the International Flame Research Foundation (IFRF) in Ijmuiden, the Netherlands.

As head of station at the IFRF, a global research hub for the industrial combustion community, "János performed with distinction," noted Philip Sharman, current IFRF director. He led a team of investigators "in a great deal of pioneering research on the aerodynamics and mixing in isothermal jet flames. … "

In 1963, Beér left to become a professor of fuel science at Penn State University. He then returned to the University of Sheffield, where he served on the faculty and later as head of the school's department of chemical engineering and fuel technology. He was awarded a doctorate of science there in 1968, and also served as dean of engineering from 1973 to 1976, when he was recruited to MIT as professor of chemical and fuel engineering.

Throughout his career, Beér focused on improving electric power generation from fossil fuels, hoping to gain efficiency, lower costs, and reduce emissions. Even after his retirement from MIT, he pursued these goals, publishing in journals well into his 80s. During his career, Beér authored more than 300 articles, co-authored "Combustion Aerodynamics" (Applied Science Publishers, 1972), a foundational textbook of the era that characterized flow patterns in flames and furnaces.

Amongst his numerous honors, Beér received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic for his support of Hungarian higher education and research. In 2012, Beér received the Worcester Reed Warner Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for his achievements, including such firsts as using water model studies as an analogy for describing combustion systems; detailing scaling laws for use in combustors and furnaces; studying single droplet combustion; and developing processes for reducing NOx emissions from a range of combustion sources.

"Beér was a giant in his field of combustion," said Gregory Stephanopoulos, the Willard Henry Dow Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering. But he was not just an accomplished researcher. Colleagues recall a friend distinguished by a certain old-world charm.

Paula Hammond, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering and head of the MIT chemical engineering department, recalls: “I knew János personally as he was my next door office suitemate when I started as a faculty member. He was the ultimate gentleman, warm, kind and ever thoughtful — asking me about my work and offering his support for me as a new junior faculty member.

“Although Janos will always be known for his many outstanding achievements in establishing and expanding the area of combustion engineering, his lasting contributions are his many past students, who were inspired and influenced by his mentorship,” Hammond says.

Yiannis A. Levendis, distinguished professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University remembers Beér's arrival for a PhD student's thesis defense, when Beér carefully fastened a pin on his ascot. "The occasion of such an important event in a student's life called for respectful formality," Beér told Levendis.

Adds Stephanopoulos: "As a true Hungarian, he appreciated good coffee and had mastered the full art of brewing temperature, duration, and amount of coffee to get a perfect cup."

"At the age of 95, I have known a lot of professors," says Edward W. Merrill, the C.P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering, emeritus. "János was a delightful, warm person — a great gentleman as well as teacher."

Details for a memorial service will be shared as soon as they become available.

Richard H. "Dick" Lyon PhD ’55, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering, passed away on Jan. 21 at the age of 89. Lyon, who taught noise, vibration, and sound quality in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering for 32 years, made many contributions to the field of acoustics both in his academic research and as founder of two companies.

Lyon was born and raised in Evansville, Indiana, the son of Gertrude Lyon and Chester Lyon, an analytic chemist. He enrolled in Evansville College (now known as the University of Evansville), which was just a short distance from his family’s home. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in physics in 1952, Lyon enrolled at MIT to pursue his doctoral degree in physics. His thesis focused on the excitation of continuous systems by random noise fields.

After receiving his PhD in 1955, Lyon was appointed as assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he remained for three years. He was then awarded a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Manchester in England, where he studied statistical energy analysis of vibration systems.

Upon returning to the United States after his postdoc, Lyon joined the company Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (now known as BBN Technologies), where he worked as a scientist conducting research and consultation projects in sound and vibration for a decade.

Lyon joined the faculty at MIT, first as lecturer in 1963 and then as professor of mechanical engineering in 1970. While at MIT, Lyon served as the head of the Division of Mechanics and Materials and was director of both the Acoustics and Vibratory Laboratory and the Structural Acoustics Program. He acted as thesis advisor to over 50 students and led research efforts in noise propagation and machinery noise until he retired from MIT in 1995.

While a professor at MIT, Lyon founded two companies. In 1970, he founded Cambridge Collaborative, Inc., a research and consulting firm in acoustics. Four years later, he founded the product and design company, RH Lyon Corp. In 2005, RH Lyon Corp merged with Acetech, which provides acoustics and vibration consulting.

Throughout his career, Lyon published several books and hundreds of technical papers. He also received numerous accolades and was a member of several prestigious societies. He served as vice president and president of the Acoustical Society of America, which awarded him their highest honor of the “Gold Medal” in 2003. He was also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society, the American Society of Mechanical Engineering, and the National Academy of Engineering. He served as a fellow for the Institution of Diagnostic Engineering and a member of the Institute of Noise Control Engineering.

Both before and after retirement, Lyon pursued his hobbies of renovating old cars and rowing on the Charles River on a single scull. He was known for hosting international students who were unable to return home for the holidays.

Lyon is survived by his wife of 53 years, Jean Wheaton Lyon, as well as his children, Katherine Lyon Davis ’78, Geoffrey Cleveland Lyon, and Suzanne Lyon Riggle.

Those wishing to honor Lyon’s memory may make a contribution to the Alzheimer's Association in his name.

Thomas (T.) Francis Ogilvie, professor emeritus of ocean engineering, passed away on March 30, at the age of 89. Ogilvie dedicated most of his career to improving how ocean engineering and naval architecture programs educated students. He served as department head for MIT’s Department of Ocean Engineering — then known as Course 13 — from 1982 to 1994.

Born in Atlantic City in 1929, Ogilvie was surrounded by ocean and boats throughout his childhood. Despite his fascination with boats, he developed an aversion to the water that surrounded him due to a dislike of getting wet. At just 16, Ogilvie enrolled in Cornell University where he studied physics. While at Cornell, he was also appointed to the position of campanologist — or bell-ringer. As bell-ringer, he would climb Cornell’s bell tower and move huge levers to sound the bells over campus, serving as an alarm clock for his fellow students.

After graduating with his bachelor’s degree in physics from Cornell, Ogilvie realized that he could study boats without getting wet. In 1951, he took a job as a physicist at the U.S. Navy’s David Taylor Model Basin (DTMB) in Maryland. While at DTMB, Ogilvie conducted research on the dynamic response of ship structures to explosive loading. He later moved on to study the wave dynamics of ships, submarines, and hydrofoils. During this time, the U.S. Navy acknowledged Ogilvie’s important contributions with a Meritorious Public Service Award in 1955.

Ogilvie received his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Maryland in 1957. Three years later, he received his PhD in engineering science from the University of California at Berkeley. After receiving his doctorate, Ogilvie moved to London for eighteen months where he served as a Liaison Scientist for the Office of Naval Research. Upon returning to the U.S., he worked at DTMB for three more years.

In 1967, Ogilvie transitioned into a career in academia. He acted as associate professor of naval architecture and marine engineering at The University of Michigan, where he also taught fluid mechanics. He was eventually named chairman of the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at the University of Michigan.

As chairman, Ogilvie made substantial changes to the department. He was responsible for a total restructuring of the undergraduate curriculum and helped develop their graduate program. Thanks in large part to his ability to garner donations from both industry and alumni, Ogilvie was responsible for the modernization of the department’s experimental facilities and the construction of a new building to house the department.

In 1981, he resigned from his role at the University of Michigan, and in 1982 he arrived at MIT as professor and department head of ocean engineering. He served as department head for 12 years.

As with his time in Michigan, Ogilvie made a number of substantial changes to MIT’s Department of Ocean Engineering. He revised the undergraduate program — now known as Course 2-OE — and helped launch several new laboratories. One of the most impactful changes he made as department head was integrating MIT’s Naval Construction and Engineering Program into MIT’s School of Engineering.

Ogilvie was beloved by his colleagues in ocean engineering at MIT. Upon stepping down as department head in 1994, he was honored with the launch of the T. Francis Ogilvie Young Investigator Lectureship in Ocean Engineering. The annual lectureship series was created in recognition of Ogilvie’s contributions to the field of ocean engineering and “with special gratitude for his commitment in mentoring and supporting young faculty and researchers.”

Throughout his career, Ogilvie was recognized with numerous awards and honors. He was invited to serve as visiting professor of naval architecture in Osaka University in Japan and honorary professor of mathematics in Manchester University in the U.K. He was a fellow and served on the executive committee of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers. In 1989, the society awarded him the William H. Webb Medal “for outstanding contributions to education in naval architecture, marine or ocean engineering.”

In 1996, the year he retired, Ogilvie also received an honorary doctorate from the National Technical University of Athens in celebration of his ship hydrodynamics research.

Ogilvie was married to Joan Husselton Ogilvie for almost 63 years, until her death in 2013. They travelled the world together and raised three children. He is survived his daughter, Nancy Ogilvie; his daughter, Beth Ogilvie, and her married partner, Susan Straghalis; and his son, Ken Ogilvie, and his wife, Sue Anderson. Donations may be made in Ogilvie’s name to the ACLU or the Alzheimer's Association.

Alexander L. M. Dingee Jr. ’52, co-founder of the MIT Venture Mentoring Service and a successful entrepreneur who started seven companies, died March 22, at his home in Rockport, Massachusetts, of complications from Parkinson’s Disease. He was 88.

The Venture Mentoring Service, with more than 175 volunteer mentors from the business world, offers entrepreneurship coaching, without charge, to MIT students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Since its founding in late 2000 as one of MIT’s first hands-on entrepreneurship programs, these mentors have worked with more than 2,800 ventures involving 3,600 individuals. These ventures collectively have raised more than $3.1 billion in funding, and more than 300 ventures have launched as viable businesses.

In 2013 Alec Dingee was awarded MIT's Lobdell Distinguished Service Award, which cited his "creative vision, exemplary dedication, and continuous involvement" as VMS co-founder.

Dingee, along with the late David H. Staelin ’60, SM ’61, ScD ’65, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, launched VMS to carry out a shared belief that young entrepreneurs would benefit greatly from advice given by others who understand the obstacles in building a business.

In an article in “MIT Spectrum” in 2001, Dingee cited how he started out in forming businesses, learning “the hard way” how to overcome the risks and roadblocks. “When I was young, I didn’t have anyone to advise me and I was in over my head. … I saw a real need for this kind of help.”

Dingee and Staelin arranged for the program’s initial funding and, introduced to each other by former MIT Provost Robert Brown, worked to place VMS’ operations under the Provost’s office as a way to ensure services would be available to all schools within the Institute. 

At the outset, Dingee’s office was sometimes his car, and he and the initial handful of other mentors frequently met with their mentees in coffee shops. Dingee spent much of his time recruiting mentees, visiting Institute laboratories to tell students, faculty, and postdocs about the help VMS could give to commercialize their accomplishments.

Within a year, VMS had grown to have a permanent office and a staff. In 2002, Sherwin Greenblatt ’62 SM ’64, the just-retired president of Bose Corp. joined as volunteer director, which freed Dingee, now as the program’s chairman, to spend time perfecting the program and exploring new directions. This led to creation of a VMS Outreach program extension, which since has provided training in VMS’s methods to representatives from 92 universities, colleges, and economic development organizations in the United States, Canada, and abroad.

Dingee’s passion for perfection is seen as critical to VMS’s success. “He always insisted on doing things right,” Greenblatt says. “Over and above just mentoring, he zealously defended mentees against injustices or wrongs.” This included a strongly enforced code of ethics to block mentors from taking advantage of mentees.

Roberta McCarthy, the program’s operations manager until 2017, looks back on how carefully the VMS concept was structured from the outset “It’s amazing how he was able to put it all together,” she says. “The original premise is how it exists today.” Charles “Chip” Ziering ’72, SM ’75, a founder of Progress Software Corp. and the first mentor to join the founders, adds, “The resulting organization's thriving activities are a tribute to his determination and drive.”

Dingee’s career as a serial entrepreneur spanned five decades. His first business was a medical-device company he started during off-hours while in the Army. The peak came with Nexabit Networks, which developed the first terabyte-level internet router and was sold in 1999 to Lucent Technologies. He also led seminars and directed research on new venture development at MIT's Sloan School of Management and co-authored a book "New Venture Creation: A Guide to Entrepreneurship."

He is survived by his wife, Susan Jennifer Gray of Rockport; his daughters, Adrienne Tybjerg and her husband Niels Tybjerg of Arlington, Massachusetts, and Janette Dingee and her husband William Brickey of Chicago; his stepson, James Wagner and his wife Dee Dee Chen of Cambridge, Massachusetts; and his first wife, Grace Dingee of Arlington.

A Service to Celebrate Alec's Life will be held at the First Congregational Church of Rockport at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, April 9. In lieu of flowers, donations in Alec's memory may be made to the MIT Venture Mentoring Service.

David Gordon Wilson, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering, passed away on May 2 at the age of 91. Wilson served on MIT’s faculty since 1966 and remained an active member of the mechanical engineering community up until his death.

Wilson was born in 1928 and grew up in Warwickshire, England. Inspired by his love for bicycles, Wilson studied engineering at the University of Birmingham, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1948. He continued his education at the University of Nottingham, where he earned his PhD in 1953.

Upon completing his PhD, Wilson was given a postdoctoral Commonwealth Fund Fellowship to conduct research abroad at MIT and Harvard University. At the conclusion of his fellowship, Wilson worked at Boeing as a gas turbine engineer.

After briefly returning to the U.K., Wilson embarked on a two-year stint in Africa, where he taught at the University Ibadan in Zaria, Nigeria. He also worked for Voluntary Service Overseas in Cameroon. A case of malaria forced Wilson to move home to England.

In 1960, Wilson was invited by the Northern Research and Engineering Corp. to serve as technical director and vice president. He was charged with leading efforts to form a London branch of the company that specialized in heat transfer and turbo-powered machinery.

At the invitation of Richard Soderberg, then the head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, Wilson joined MIT’s faculty in 1966. He taught thermodynamics and mechanical design. As a professor, Wilson served as advisor to a number of students conducting research in turbomachinery, fluid mechanics, and various design topics.

While much of his primary research focused on turbine gas engines and jet engine design, Wilson parlayed a number of his passions into professional pursuits. His interest in transportation led to an appointment on a commission of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, where he gave recommendations on how to increase use and efficiency in public transportation. He also served on the Center for Transportation Studies.

Transportation was a key theme in Wilson’s career — not only in his research on jet engines, but also in a thread that would weave throughout his life: his love of bicycles. Wilson was particularly enamored with recumbent bicycles. In 1967, he helped organize an international design competition in human-powered land transport in an effort to get more people interested in bicycle design.

In 1974, Wilson released the first edition of "Bicycling Science." It became MIT Press' best-selling book and is regarded as the premiere authority on bicycle design. Throughout the 1970s, he continued to design recumbent bicycles. He eventually designed the Avatar 2000, a bike that broke the world record in speed at the International Human Powered Vehicle Association in 1982.

Around the same time, Wilson studied fossil fuel emissions and human impact on the environment. He was a staunch advocate for a “carbon fee” to encourage companies to curb fossil fuel emissions and promote the adoption of renewable energy. This pursuit got him more engaged in government, and as a result he joined the Massachusetts chapter of the grassroots organization Common Cause. He also was co-founder of the Massachusetts Action on Smoking and Health, which advocated for nonsmokers' rights.

After 28 years on the faculty at MIT, Wilson retired in 1994. In 2001, he co-founded Wilson TurboPower, a company focused on the development of microturbines.

In retirement, Wilson remained an active member of the MIT community — often attending departmental meetings and serving as a faculty judge at the annual de Florez Awards. He is survived by his wife, Ellen Wilson, his two daughters, Erica Mandau and Susan Wilson, and his granddaughter.

A memorial service will be held on May 17 at 10 a.m. at The Parish of the Epiphany, 70 Church Street, Winchester, Massachusetts.

Franklin M. Fisher, the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics, emeritus, died on April 29 at the age of 84. 

Fisher was born in New York City and received both his undergraduate degree and his PhD from Harvard University. He joined the MIT faculty in 1960, after a one-year post-PhD stint as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Fisher spent the rest of his career at MIT. In 2000, he was appointed the inaugural holder of the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professorship of Microeconomics. He became a professor emeritus in 2004. 

Fisher was a versatile economist who made important contributions to economic theory, econometric methods, and the empirical analysis of firm and industry behavior. He was best known for his research on aggregation theory, estimation of simultaneous equation models, and the measurement and consequences of industry concentration. His contributions were widely celebrated. In 1973, he received the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association, an award then presented every other year to the American economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contributions to economic thought and knowledge. He served as president of the Econometric Society, was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and held an honorary degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Fisher was actively involved in antitrust policy. He served as the lead economic expert for IBM in the 1970s, when the U.S. Department of Justice sued the firm for anticompetitive behavior. After the case was settled in the early 1980s, he and co-authors John McGowan and Joen Greenwood published "Folded, Spindled and Mutilated," a comprehensive analysis of the economic issues in the case. Several years later, Fisher served as the lead expert for the Department of Justice in another high-profile antitrust case, U.S. v. Microsoft. 

Late in his career, Fisher’s interests shifted to the economics of water distribution in the Middle East, leading a team to model water resources and identify opportunities for gains from cross-border water trading. 

Fisher was a very popular teacher and an active dissertation adviser. He served as the primary adviser for 47 doctoral students, and as the secondary adviser (committee member) for dozens more. Five of his advisees are current MIT faculty members, including Nancy L. Rose ’85, the current department head for Economics. 

“Frank was a wonderful mentor whose lectures combined technical rigor with a rich interest in applied questions," Rose says. "He was in high demand as a dissertation supervisor, where his advice ranged from econometric specifications to the craft of writing.”

Fisher was active in a broad range of outside pursuits. He was a silver life master of duplicate bridge and an avid sailor. His work with numerous nonprofit organizations included presidencies of American Friends of Peace Now, the New Israel Fund, and the American Jewish Congress New England Region.

He is survived by his wife, Ellen Paradise Fisher of Cambridge, Massachusetts; three children: Abraham and Abigail of Belmont, Massachusetts, and Naomi of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and their spouses; and eight grandchildren.   
 

James D. Livingston, MIT senior lecturer emeritus, and his wife, Sherry H. Penney, died last week at their home in Sarasota, Florida, where they spent their winters. Married for 34 years, he was 88 and she was 81; the cause was accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.

Livingston's undergraduate education was in engineering physics at Cornell University, and his doctorate was in applied physics from Harvard University. He joined MIT in 1989, coming from Schenectady, New York, where he had been a physicist at GE Corporate Research and Development. The move to Boston was driven by his wife’s career; she was the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Boston and served for a time as the acting president of the UMass system. His work focused on magnetic materials, including metallic superconductors and rare-earth permanent magnets.

At MIT, Livingston remained active in research, collaborating with several colleagues, mentoring graduate and undergraduate students, and adding valuable expertise to MIT’s teaching and research enterprise. He taught in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (Course 3, DMSE) undergraduate core and served as a first-year advisor, teaching a seminar on magnets. His accomplishments were recognized with awards including membership in the National Academy of Engineering and election to fellow of both ASM International and the American Physical Society, as well as MIT's Best First-Year Advisor Award. He authored many journal articles and books, on a variety of topics: "Electronic Properties of Engineering Materials" was based on his lectures for the DMSE undergrad curriculum; "Driving Force" and "Rising Force" are popular science books on magnetism; and, in a departure from science, he wrote "A Very Dangerous Woman: Martha Wright and Women's Rights" (co-authored with his wife) and "Arsenic and Clam Chowder: Murder in Gilded Age New York," both histories that grew out of family research.

Although Livingston held a part-time position at MIT, he was fully committed to the students and their needs, and to the Institute. He taught many different classes, was a thesis advisor for graduate students, participated in professional education programs, and served as an ambassador for materials science and STEM education. His textbook, "Electronic Properties of Engineering Materials," was praised by students who used it — one even mentioned it on the subject evaluation, saying "the textbook ROCKS."  

Conversation with Livingston was entertaining, stimulating, and educational, studded with humor and anecdotes that helped make his point. Professor Emeritus Sam Allen says, "Both his writing and lecturing style were engaging because of Jim's conversational style and use of easily grasped examples to teach complex concepts." In one case, he told a class that the easiest thing to do was to find a needle in a haystack; "Needles are magnetic, hay isn't. All you need is a magnet," remembers Chris Schuh, head of DMSE.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. May 25 in First Baptist Church in Hingham, Massachusetts. The service will be led by Rev. Kenneth Read-Brown, minister of First Parish, Hingham, known as Old Ship Church, a Unitarian Universalist congregation to which the couple belonged for many years, and which was unavailable due to repair work. A memorial service in Sarasota will be announced.

Norman A. Phillips, head of the former Department of Meteorology during the 1970s, died on March 15 at the age of 95. His work in atmospheric science showing monthly and seasonal tropospheric patterns led to the creation of first general circulation model, which became the bedrock of weather and climate study today.

Phillips’ introduction to the study of weather, which later blossomed into a passion, started when he was relatively young. Born to Alton Elmer Anton Phillips and Linnea (Larson) Phillips in 1923, Norman Phillips began his life in Chicago, Illinois. He entered the University of Chicago in 1940 to pursue chemistry. However, when World War II began, he was inspired by the work of University of Chicago’s Carl-Gustaf Rossby — now known as the "father of meteorology" and who helped to establish the Department of Meteorology at MIT — to train weather officers and take up a field he had never before encountered. He enlisted in the program, established by Rossby, with the U.S. Army Air Corps. Here, Phillips received computation meteorology training in Mississippi, at the University of Michigan, and in Illinois.

Deployed to the Azores, he obtained atmospheric data and created daily forecasts for the Allied troops in spite of difficult weather conditions and communications difficulties. Working alongside experienced meteorologists, Phillips developed incredible insight and appreciation for the work. After the war, he was discharged as a first lieutenant and returned to Chicago to resume his studies, now with a focus on meteorology. Phillips earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in 1947, 1948, and 1951, respectively. At this point, the field was just getting off the ground.

Phillips’ first major contribution to meteorology and the creation of reliable forecasting came during his PhD thesis work. Around the time the first computers were coming online, in 1950, the first numerical forecast was generated. It was developed to better understand how weather systems develop and intensify. It treated the atmosphere as a single layer, however, and subsequently meteorologists like Rossby considered a “two-level model” which better captured the dynamics of the atmosphere. Phillips combined this newer model with the work on baroclinic instability by Jule Charney, another giant in the field who later worked alongside and headed the department at MIT after Phillips. This allowed for the numerical growth of atmospheric waves that resembled those in the real world.

Shortly before finishing his degree, Phillips joined the Electronic Computer Project at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, with Charney and several other leading meteorologists with whom Phillips would work with over his career. Expanding on these models, he applied his work to the same cyclonic weather system Phillips used for his thesis and made the first computer simulation reproducing it. “It was my understanding that it was the success with this storm that convinced the Weather Bureau, the Air Force, and the Navy to set up the original version of the NMC [National Meteorological Center] in 1954. This was the Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit…” said Phillips in a seminar at MIT in 1988.

After a brief stint in Stockholm to assist Rossby set up a weather model there, Phillips spent time in Oslo understanding the troposphere and different cells of atmospheric circulation capable to transporting heat. In Princeton, Phillips applied this to his general circulation model and was able to construct a forecast, which would breakdown after about a month. He also showed that fronts formed as a result of cyclogenesis, not the other way around as previously thought. This significant achievement became the first climate general circulation model.

Around this time, MIT was building a powerhouse of meteorological and oceanographic experts; in the summer of 1956, then department head Henry Houghton recruited Jule Charney and Norman Phillips. While here, he held the titles of research associate, associate professor, and professor. He led the Department of Meteorology — a precursor to today’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) — for four years, beginning in 1970. Phillips left an indelible mark on MIT and the broader scientific community. He served on numerous national and international committees. As co-editor of the Journal of Atmospheric Science, he took it upon himself to ensure publications of the highest quality.

In July of 1974, Phillips left for the National Weather Service at the National Meteorological Center to pursue numerical weather prediction and data assimilation. He stayed there for four years before retiring in 1988; however, possessing an agile mind, he continued to publish well into his golden years.

Phillips’ research had dramatically changed the way we think about our atmosphere; for these contributions to the field of meteorology, he has been recognized with numerous honors. In 2003, Phillips along with Joseph Smagorinsky received the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the National Weather Service, National Meteorological Center “for their major contributions to the prediction of weather and climate using numerical methods.”

Their seminal and pioneering studies led to the first computer models of weather and climate, as well as to an understanding of the general circulation of the atmosphere, including the transports of heat and moisture that determine the Earth's climate. In addition, Smagorinsky played a leading role in establishing the current global observational network for the atmosphere, and Phillips' leadership fostered the development of effective methods for the use of observations in data assimilation systems.

The American Meteorological Society also selected him for the highly prestigious distinction of an honorary member. From the same institution, he received the Meisinger Award, the Editor’s Award, the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Award (it’s highest honor), the Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Advance of Applied Meteorology, and was appointed a distinguished lecturer. Among his other honors, Phillips was also presented with the Napier Shaw Prize, elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and presented the 6th World Meteorological Organization’s lecture.

Phillips was predeceased by his beloved wife Martha (Nissen) Phillips, whom he married in 1945; his daughter Ruth Walsh; and sister Alice (Phillips) Westphal. Phillips is survived by daughters Janet Grigsby and Ellen Chasse. He is also survived by grandsons Stephen Walsh, Matthew Grigsby, Christopher Grigsby, Derek Chasse and Keith Chasse, plus great grandchildren Ryan and Riley Walsh and Morgan and Travis Chasse.

A memorial service will be held on June 29 at 11 a.m. at the Rivet Funeral Home, 425 Daniel Webster Highway in Merrimack, New Hampshire.

Celebrated architect I.M. Pei ’40 died on May 16 in New York City. He was 102.

Over the course of a long international career, he designed notable buildings that included museums, cultural and research centers, civic buildings, and office towers. A dedicated modernist, he received the architecture world’s highest honors for his large body of work.

Among his best-known projects are the glass pyramid entrance pavilion he designed for the Louvre museum in Paris, and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

In 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy chose Pei to design the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Other Boston-area projects include the west wing of the Museum of Fine Arts.

“Pei was a giant whose vast and varied output consistently rose to the civic responsibility of architecture, elevating cultural, institutional, and residential buildings alike to monuments of modern life,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

Pei designed four buildings for the MIT campus:

• Cecil and Ida Green Building for Earth Sciences (Building 54), 1962
• Camille Edouard Dreyfus Chemistry Building (Building 18), 1967
• Ralph Landau Building for Chemical Engineering (Building 66), 1976
• Wiesner Building (Building E15, original home of the MIT Media Lab), 1985

“Pei's contribution to the physical environment of MIT has been significant, with several key buildings that established the form of the contemporary campus,” says Andrew Scott, professor and acting head of the Department of Architecture. “Building 66, which poses a triangular form that finely resolves the forces of the urban geometry, and Building 18, which elegantly frames the landscape of the inner quads, are still personal favorites and outstanding laboratory typologies to this day.”

Ieoh Ming Pei was born on April 26, 1917, in Canton (now Guangzhou), China. The son of a prominent banker, he grew up in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Pei began his college studies at the University of Pennsylvania before transferring to MIT, from which he graduated in 1940 with a bachelor of architecture degree. His thesis title was “Standardized Propaganda Units for War Time and Peace Time China.”

He met his wife, Eileen (Ay-Ling) Loo, also from China, while he was at MIT and she was studying art at Wellesley College. They married when she graduated, in 1942; both then pursued graduate study at Harvard University, from which he received a master’s degree in 1946.

After teaching briefly at Harvard, Pei worked for New York commercial real estate developer William Zeckendorf for 12 years. During this time he hired a former student, Henry Cobb, with whom he would be professionally associated for six decades. Pei founded his own firm, I.M. Pei and Associates (later Pei, Cobb and Freed), in 1955 with Cobb and Eason Leonard. Among a vast number of projects, the firm produced the 700-foot-tall John Hancock Tower in Boston, designed by Cobb.

“I.M. Pei’s work across many contexts and cultures has an enduring, timeless quality,” says Scott. “He was a master-architect with a deep understanding and sophistication with issues of urbanism, scale of object and detail, spatial orchestration, and formal composition.”

Among his many awards and honors were the Pritzker Prize in 1983; the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1979; and the Japanese Praemium Imperiale, for lifetime achievement, in 1989.

Pei was member of the MIT Corporation (1972–1977 and 1978–1983) and an honorary member of the Council for the Arts at MIT.

He is survived by sons Li Chung Pei and Chien Chung Pei, both architects; daughter Liane Pei, a lawyer; and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His son T’ing Chung Pei MCP ‘67, an urban planner, died in 2003. Eileen Pei died in 2014.

Philip G. Freelon MArch ’77, professor of the practice in the MIT Department of Architecture, lead architect for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and a dedicated force for inclusivity within the field of architecture, died on July 9 in Durham, North Carolina, of the neuro-degenerative disease amyotrphic lateral sclerosis (ALS), with which he had been diagnosed in 2016. He was 66.

For nine years beginning in 2007, Freelon taught 4.222 (Professional Practice), a required subject in the master’s in architecture program that uses current examples to illustrate the legal, ethical, and management concepts underlying the practice of architecture.

“Phil was a remarkable architect, a motivating teacher, a spirited public intellectual and above all, an exceptional human being whose modesty and respect of others and their ideas put the best face on the architect and on the profession,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P). 

A native of Philadelphia, Freelon attended Hampton University in Virginia before transferring to North Carolina State University, from which he graduated in 1975 with a bachelor of environmental design degree in architecture. He earned his master’s degree in architecture from MIT and at age 25 was the youngest person to pass the Architecture Registration Exam in North Carolina.

The Freelon Group, which he founded in 1990, became one of the largest African American-owned architectural firms in the country.

“Phil Freelon was a creative and productive alumnus of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning,” says Adèle Naudé Santos, SA+P dean when Freelon joined the faculty. “His buildings are beautifully crafted and spatially inventive, and we were proud to have him on our faculty. We are greatly saddened by his passing.”

Freelon headed multifaceted design teams for museum projects and cultural institutions such as the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture in Baltimore, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts and Culture in Charlotte, Emancipation Park in Houston, and the Anacostia and Tenleytown branches of the District of Columbia Public Library System.

The practice joined with three other design firms as Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup to create the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. As lead architect and architect of record for the project, on which David Adjaye was lead designer, Freelon directed the programming and planning effort that set the stage for the museum’s design. 

In 2014, The Freelon Group joined global design firm Perkins and Will. Recent and current projects led by Freelon include North Carolina Freedom Park in Raleigh, the Durham County Human Services Complex, the Durham Transportation Center, and the Motown Museum Expansion in Detroit. He was appointed to the board of directors and the executive committee of Perkins and Will while serving dual roles as managing director and design director of the firm’s North Carolina practice.

In addition to his role at MIT, he was an adjunct faculty member at North Carolina State University’s College of Design and lectured at Harvard University (where he was a Loeb Fellow), the University of Maryland, Syracuse University, Auburn University, the University of Utah, the University of California at Berkeley, Kent State University, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, among others. A Peer Professional for the GSA’s Design Excellence Program, he also served on numerous design award juries including the National AIA Institute Honor Awards jury and the National Endowment for the Arts Design Stewardship Panel. 

“Phil was one of the hardest working people I ever knew,” said Lawrence Sass, associate professor in the Department of Architecture at MIT and director of the computation group. “I could not believe that someone so humble could have done so much. He was a dedicated professor in addition to being a trusted design professional, and a leader who lived in the spirit of a design giant. He taught from real-world experience. He was emotionally and professionally accessible. I will forever miss and remember his larger-than-life presence walking down the Infinite Corridor.”

Freelon was a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and the recipient of the AIA North Carolina’s Gold Medal, its highest individual honor. A LEED Accredited Professional, he was the 2009 recipient of the AIA Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture, and in 2011 was appointed by President Obama to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. The Freelon Group received 26 AIA design awards (regional, state, and local) and received AIA North Carolina’s Outstanding Firm Award (2001). Freelon’s furniture design received first prize in the PPG Furniture Design Competition, and he did design contract work with Herman Miller.

His work has appeared in national professional publications including Architecture, Progressive Architecture, Architectural Record, and Contract magazine (Designer of the Year, 2008), and his and the firm’s work has been featured in Metropolis and Metropolitan Home magazines and the The New York Times. 

Freelon is survived by his wife of 40 years, Nnenna Freelon; his children Deen, Maya, and Pierce; three siblings; and six grandchildren. A celebration of his life will be held on Sept. 28 at the Durham County Human Services Complex in Durham. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to NorthStar Church of the Arts, a nonprofit art and culture center founded by Nnenna and Phil Freelon.

Fernando “Corby” Corbató, an MIT professor emeritus whose work in the 1960s on time-sharing systems broke important ground in democratizing the use of computers, died on Friday, July 12, at his home in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He was 93.

Decades before the existence of concepts like cybersecurity and the cloud, Corbató led the development of one of the world’s first operating systems. His “Compatible Time-Sharing System” (CTSS) allowed multiple people to use a computer at the same time, greatly increasing the speed at which programmers could work. It’s also widely credited as the first computer system to use passwords. 

After CTSS Corbató led a time-sharing effort called Multics, which directly inspired operating systems like Linux and laid the foundation for many aspects of modern computing. Multics doubled as a fertile training ground for an emerging generation of programmers that included C programming language creator Dennis Ritchie, Unix developer Ken Thompson, and spreadsheet inventors Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston.

Before time-sharing, using a computer was tedious and required detailed knowledge. Users would create programs on cards and submit them in batches to an operator, who would enter them to be run one at a time over a series of hours. Minor errors would require repeating this sequence, often more than once.

But with CTSS, which was first demonstrated in 1961, answers came back in mere seconds, forever changing the model of program development. Decades before the PC revolution, Corbató and his colleagues also opened up communication between users with early versions of email, instant messaging, and word processing. 

“Corby was one of the most important researchers for making computing available to many people for many purposes,” says long-time colleague Tom Van Vleck. “He saw that these concepts don’t just make things more efficient; they fundamentally change the way people use information.”

Besides making computing more efficient, CTSS also inadvertently helped establish the very concept of digital privacy itself. With different users wanting to keep their own files private, CTSS introduced the idea of having people create individual accounts with personal passwords. Corbató’s vision of making high-performance computers available to more people also foreshadowed trends in cloud computing, in which tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft rent out shared servers to companies around the world. 

“Other people had proposed the idea of time-sharing before,” says Jerry Saltzer, who worked on CTSS with Corbató after starting out as his teaching assistant. “But what he brought to the table was the vision and the persistence to get it done.”

CTSS was also the spark that convinced MIT to launch “Project MAC,” the precursor to the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). LCS later merged with the Artificial Intelligence Lab to become MIT’s largest research lab, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), which is now home to more than 600 researchers. 

“It’s no overstatement to say that Corby’s work on time-sharing fundamentally transformed computers as we know them today,” says CSAIL Director Daniela Rus. “From PCs to smartphones, the digital revolution can directly trace its roots back to the work that he led at MIT nearly 60 years ago.” 

In 1990 Corbató was honored for his work with the Association of Computing Machinery’s Turing Award, often described as “the Nobel Prize for computing.”

From sonar to CTSS

Corbató was born on July 1, 1926 in Oakland, California. At 17 he enlisted as a technician in the U.S. Navy, where he first got the engineering bug working on a range of radar and sonar systems. After World War II he earned his bachelor's degree at Caltech before heading to MIT to complete a PhD in physics. 

As a PhD student, Corbató met Professor Philip Morse, who recruited him to work with his team on Project Whirlwind, the first computer capable of real-time computation. After graduating, Corbató joined MIT's Computation Center as a research assistant, soon moving up to become deputy director of the entire center. 

It was there that he started thinking about ways to make computing more efficient. For all its innovation, Whirlwind was still a rather clunky machine. Researchers often had trouble getting much work done on it, since they had to take turns using it for half-hour chunks of time. (Corbató said that it had a habit of crashing every 20 minutes or so.) 

Since computer input and output devices were much slower than the computer itself, in the late 1950s a scheme called multiprogramming was developed to allow a second program to run whenever the first program was waiting for some device to finish. Time-sharing built on this idea, allowing other programs to run while the first program was waiting for a human user to type a request, thus allowing the user to interact directly with the first program.

Saltzer says that Corbató pioneered a programming approach that would be described today as agile design. 

“It’s a buzzword now, but back then it was just this iterative approach to coding that Corby encouraged and that seemed to work especially well,” he says.  

In 1962 Corbató published a paper about CTSS that quickly became the talk of the slowly-growing computer science community. The following year MIT invited several hundred programmers to campus to try out the system, spurring a flurry of further research on time-sharing.

Foreshadowing future technological innovation, Corbató was amazed — and amused — by how quickly people got habituated to CTSS’ efficiency.

“Once a user gets accustomed to [immediate] computer response, delays of even a fraction of a minute are exasperatingly long,” he presciently wrote in his 1962 paper. “First indications are that programmers would readily use such a system if it were generally available.”

Multics, meanwhile, expanded on CTSS’ more ad hoc design with a hierarchical file system, better interfaces to email and instant messaging, and more precise privacy controls. Peter Neumann, who worked at Bell Labs when they were collaborating with MIT on Multics, says that its design prevented the possibility of many vulnerabilities that impact modern systems, like “buffer overflow” (which happens when a program tries to write data outside the computer’s short-term memory). 

“Multics was so far ahead of the rest of the industry,” says Neumann. “It was intensely software-engineered, years before software engineering was even viewed as a discipline.” 

In spearheading these time-sharing efforts, Corbató served as a soft-spoken but driven commander in chief — a logical thinker who led by example and had a distinctly systems-oriented view of the world.

“One thing I liked about working for Corby was that I knew he could do my job if he wanted to,” says Van Vleck. “His understanding of all the gory details of our work inspired intense devotion to Multics, all while still being a true gentleman to everyone on the team.” 

Another legacy of the professor’s is “Corbató’s Law,” which states that the number of lines of code someone can write in a day is the same regardless of the language used. This maxim is often cited by programmers when arguing in favor of using higher-level languages.

Corbató was an active member of the MIT community, serving as associate department head for computer science and engineering from 1974 to 1978 and 1983 to 1993. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

Corbató is survived by his wife, Emily Corbató, from Brooklyn, New York; his stepsons, David and Jason Gish; his brother, Charles; and his daughters, Carolyn and Nancy, from his marriage to his late wife Isabel; and five grandchildren. 

In lieu of flowers, gifts may be made to MIT’s Fernando Corbató Fellowship Fund via Bonny Kellermann in the Memorial Gifts Office. 

CSAIL will host an event to honor and celebrate Corbató in the coming months. 

Patrick Winston, a beloved professor and computer scientist at MIT, died on July 19 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He was 76.
 
A professor at MIT for almost 50 years, Winston was director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997 before it merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science to become MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
 
A devoted teacher and cherished colleague, Winston led CSAIL’s Genesis Group, which focused on developing AI systems that have human-like intelligence, including the ability to tell, perceive, and comprehend stories. He believed that such work could help illuminate aspects of human intelligence that scientists don’t yet understand.
 
“My principal interest is in figuring out what’s going on inside our heads, and I’m convinced that one of the defining features of human intelligence is that we can understand stories,'” said Winston, the Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, in a 2011 interview for CSAIL. “Believing as I do that stories are important, it was natural for me to try to build systems that understand stories, and that shed light on what the story-understanding process is all about.”
 
He was renowned for his accessible and informative lectures, and gave a hugely popular talk every year during the Independent Activities Period called “How to Speak.” 
 
“As a speaker he always had his audience in the palm of his hand,” says MIT Professor Peter Szolovits. “He put a tremendous amount of work into his lectures, and yet managed to make them feel loose and spontaneous. He wasn’t flashy, but he was compelling and direct. ”
 
Winston’s dedication to teaching earned him many accolades over the years, including the Baker Award, the Eta Kappa Nu Teaching Award, and the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award.
 
“Patrick’s humanity and his commitment to the highest principles made him the soul of EECS,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote in a letter to the MIT community. “I called on him often for advice and feedback, and he always responded with kindness, candor, wisdom and integrity.  I will be forever grateful for his counsel, his objectivity, and his tremendous inspiration and dedication to our students.”
 
Teaching computers to think

Born Feb. 5, 1943 in Peoria, Illinois, Winston was always exceptionally curious about science, technology and how to use such tools to explore what it means to be human. He was an MIT-lifer starting in 1961, earning his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the Institute before joining the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1970.
 
His thesis work with Marvin Minsky centered on the difficulty of learning, setting off a trajectory of work where he put a playful, yet laser-sharp focus on fine-tuning AI systems to better understand stories.
 
His Genesis project aimed to faithfully model computers after human intelligence in order to fully grasp the inner workings of our own motivations, rationality, and perception. Using MIT research scientist Boris Katz’s START natural language processing system and a vision system developed by former MIT PhD student Sajit Rao, Genesis can digest short, simple chunks of text, then spit out reports about how it interpreted connections between events.
 
While the system has processed many works, Winston chose “Macbeth” as a primary text because the tragedy offers an opportunity to take big human themes, such as greed and revenge, and map out their components.
 
“[Shakespeare] was pretty good at his portrayal of ‘the human condition,’ as my friends in the humanities would say,” Winston told The Boston Globe. “So there’s all kinds of stuff in there about what’s typical when we humans wander through the world.”
 
His deep fascination with humanity, human intelligence, and how we communicate information spilled over into what he often described as his favorite academic activity: teaching.
 
“He was a superb educator who introduced the field to generations of students,” says MIT Professor and longtime colleague Randall Davis. “His lectures had an uncanny ability to move in minutes from the details of an algorithm to the larger issues it illustrated, to yet larger lessons about how to be a scientist and a human being.”
 
A past president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Winston also wrote and edited numerous books, including a seminal textbook on AI that’s still used in classrooms around the world. Outside of the lab he also co-founded Ascent Technology, which produces scheduling and workforce management applications for major airports.
 
He is survived by his wife Karen Prendergast and his daughter Sarah.

Alumnus Steven John Keating SM '12, PhD '16 passed away from brain cancer on July 19 at the age of 31.

Keating received his master’s degree and PhD in mechanical engineering and was a member of the MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter team. He inspired countless people with his courageous, research-driven approach to battling cancer and was a champion for patient access to health data. 

Curiosity was a driving force in Keating’s life. Growing up in Calgary, Canada, he spent a large portion of his childhood tinkering with and building devices. This predilection for making led to not only his love of engineering, but also his affinity for film and photography. As an undergraduate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, Keating pursued his twin passions — earning a dual degree in mechanical and materials engineering alongside a degree in film and media.

In 2010, Keating fulfilled his lifelong dream of attending MIT and enrolled as a graduate student studying mechanical engineering. He joined the Media Lab’s Mediated Matter group under his co-advisor Neri Oxman, the Sony Corporation Career Development Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences.

At the Media Lab, Keating conducted research on additive manufacturing and synthetic biology. He pushed the limits of 3-D printing and developed a technology that could 3-D print the foundation of a building. This technology was recently acquired by NASA for potential applications in their pursuit of landing on the moon by 2024.

“Steve utilized humor while solving equations and inspired a sense of empathy when discussing ethical issues associated with robotics and synthetic biology,” Oxman reflects. “The projects he left behind are very much alive and will continue to have meaningful impact on the physical and societal landscapes we inhabit.”

In the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Keating served as a teaching assistant for the senior capstone class 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes), alongside his co-advisor, David Wallace, professor of mechanical engineering. He also helped teach the popular introductory course 2.00b (Toy Product Design) with Wallace.

“Steve had an infectious kindness and curiosity that elevated those around him, exploring simply for the joy and thrill of learning,” says Wallace. “His teaching contributions in our freshman toy product design and senior product engineering design classes made an enduring impact.”

Four years into his graduate studies at MIT, Keating’s world was turned upside down when a baseball-sized tumor was found in his brain. The innate curiosity that had brought him to MIT ultimately led to his diagnosis. In a 2014 speech at the Koch Institute, Keating recalled: “Curiosity is why we are here [at MIT] doing research, and ironically that’s how I found my tumor.”

As an undergraduate in 2007, Keating had participated in a brain study purely out of curiosity. His MRI scans revealed a small dime-sized abnormality located near the smell center of his brain. This knowledge prompted Keating to seek medical attention when, in the summer of 2014, he began smelling vinegar and getting headaches. A new MRI scan showed a low-grade glioma in the frontal left lobe of his brain that would require immediate surgery.

After receiving this news, Yoel Fink, professor of materials science and engineering, entered Keating’s life. Fink had previously developed a fiber optic scalpel that enabled minimally invasive surgery on brain tumors. As a result, he was connected to the top neurosurgeons in the world. Fink put Keating in touch with E. Antonio Chiocca, neurosurgeon-in-chief and chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Chiocca performed the surgery to remove his tumor.

In an email to his friends and family in advance of the surgery, Keating wrote: “The world is a lovely, splendid, and fascinating place. But most of all, to me, it is beautifully curious.”

Keating proved to be anything but an average patient. “Steve confronted his disease like a true “MITer”: He studied it, researched it, applied his creativity and interest in the sciences and engineering to see how best to face this enemy,” explains Chiocca.

Ever the researcher, Keating craved every possible data point he could get about his diagnosis and treatment. Upon learning that accessing medical data required the approval of a medical doctor, he enrolled in an MD program while finishing up his PhD – earning him the nickname ‘MacGyver’ among his colleagues in the Media Lab.

Keating poured over footage of his 10-hour surgery, analyzed his own MRI scans, and had his microbiome sequenced. He even 3-D printed a model of his tumor, which he gifted his friends and family as a very unique Christmas ornament. This model led to a partnership with colleagues at the Media Lab and Harvard University to develop a new method to 3-D print more detailed models from medical images.

Keating collected 200 gigabytes of his own medical data. Given that knowledge of his own MRI scans and medical data led to his timely diagnosis, he became a staunch advocate for open-sourcing patient data. He wanted to empower patients to gain access to their own health information.

“Steve became a voice for patients’ desires to have access and own the data for their disease,” adds Chiocca. “He did this with humility, courage, joy and affability.”

Keating’s crusade on behalf of patients everywhere led to a New York Times article about his efforts in March 2015. His story was covered widely by the media and inspired millions of people. He gave a TEDx Talk about his experiences, joined the Federal Precision Medicine Task Force, and received an invitation to the White House by President Barack Obama.

“For him it was all about awareness — he was willing to give up his privacy and share his data with the world to advance the likelihood of an eventual cure for this disease,” says Fink, who along with Oxman remained close to Keating and his family throughout the years.

In remission thanks to the efforts of Chiocca and his team of doctors, Keating continued his work with Oxman in the Mediated Matter group. “Even and especially while battling cancer, Steve remained noble in his ways,” adds Oxman. “Whether taking the initiative on group-based work or gathering the team to discuss a new publication, it was humbling to watch him help others as he battled his challenging condition.”

Keating graduated with his PhD in 2016. He moved to Silicon Valley, where he worked as a design engineer at Apple.

Last summer after a routine check-up, he was told he had glioblastoma, a malignant and incurable form of brain cancer. Even after receiving this devastating diagnosis, Keating never lost sight of the impact he could have on others. He tirelessly advocated for patient access to medical data in an effort to save the lives of others, all while undergoing multiple experimental trials and courageously fighting for his own life.

“A defining element of his character was to be gracious and giving while he was fighting the battle of his life,” says Fink.

Though Keating ultimately succumbed to the disease, others will take up his mantle in the fight for a cure and greater access to patient data. Two days before he passed away, the first ever Glioblastoma Awareness Day was observed to raise awareness and honor those who have lost their lives to this aggressive form of brain cancer.

“Steve never let the knowledge that glioblastoma remains incurable stop him from living his life to the fullest without anger and disappointment,” adds Chiocca. “As cancer scientists, we will continue to research this disease so that Steve’s fight remains our fight.“

His passion and spirit will live on with his former colleagues at MIT. “Steven’s presence was luminous and so is his legacy,” says Oxman. “My team and I are honored to continue where our very own ‘MacGyver’ left off.”

Keating is survived by his parents, John and Lynn, and his sister, Laura. In lieu of a traditional memorial service, Keating’s family will be launching a “cyber celebration” as a forum for people to honor and celebrate his inspiring, curiosity-driven life. This article will be updated with more information when it’s available.

Professor Emeritus Samuel A. Bowring, a longtime MIT professor of geology, died on July 17 at age 65.

Known for his exceptional skill as a field geologist and for innovatons in uranium-lead isotopic geochronology, Bowring worked to achieve unprecedented analytical precision and accuracy in calibrating the geologic record and reconstructing the co-evolution of life and the solid Earth.

No dates, no rates

A favorite aphorism, “No dates, no rates,” appeared in many of Bowring’s lectures and talks — meaning, to fully understand the past events preserved in the rock record you have to understand their timing. One of his earliest major contributions, which transformed what geologist know about the early evolution of the Earth, was his work in the 1980s on the Acasta gneiss complex, a rock body in northwestern Canada, pushing back the date of the oldest-known rocks to 4.03 billion years. The granitic samples he collected from an outcrop on an island in the remote Acasta River basin turned out to be rare remnants of the Earth’s earliest crust.  

“What is more important about the Acasta gneiss complex than its 4.03 billion year age alone is its character, which Sam recognized and documented,” said Paul Hoffman, Harvard University Sturgis Hooper Professor Emeritus of Geology and career-long Bowring collaborator and friend. Hoffman explains that the Acasta rocks, paired with Bowring’s advocacy, fundamentally changed geologists’ understanding of continental formation. Prior to Bowring’s work the prevailing view was that the continents had steadily grown over geologic time. But, with these ancient gneiss samples, Bowring was able to characterize a complex history which predated the moment of their crystallization, which points instead to a process of ongoing crustal “recycling” — where rock near the Earth’s surface, through the mechanisms of plate tectonics, is subsumed and transformed by the mantle’s convective currents. According to Hoffman, “Sam’s fascination with the creation and preservation of continental crust never left him, whether he was at Great Bear Lake, the Grand Canyon, or the High Cascades in Washington State.”

Beyond studying the physical processes which shape the lithosphere, Bowring also sought to understand those which shape the biosphere. His work on sedimentary layers of the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary age determined the timing and rate of the pivotal biological event known as the Cambrian Explosion, beginning nearly 540 million years ago. He was able to establish that the Early Cambrian period which saw the most dramatic burst of evolutionary activity and animal diversity ever known — including the first emergence of chordates, brachiopods, and arthropods — spanned not 10 to 50 million years as was previously-believed, but instead lasted a mere 5 to 6 million years.

Longtime friend and colleague Tim Grove, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, wrote of the achievement in a citation for the American Geophysical Union when Bowring was awarded the Walter H. Bucher Medal in 2016: “Sam showed that during this brief time interval more phyla than have ever since existed on Earth came into existence. This represents a truly profound and astonishing new discovery about how life evolved on Earth.”

Bowring also established the timing and duration of what has come to be known as “The Great Dying”: the largest of Earth’s five major mass extinctions, which marked the end of the Permian period and saw the elimination of over 96% of marine species and about 70% of species on land. Rocks collected by Bowring and collaborators from sites across China spanning the Permian-Triassic boundary revealed that the ecological collapse happened at breakneck speed — occurring in less than 30,000 years at a rate many times faster than previous estimates — and with little-to-no warning in geological terms.

A world-expert in uranium-lead isotopic dating, by 2002 Bowring began to see what he later termed “the double-edged sword of high-precision geochronology.” As the field experienced rapid advancements in precision, resolution, and quantitative stratigraphic analyses, many new techniques were developing in parallel. He recognized that without calibration and intercalibration of radioisotopic dating methods and quantitative chronostratigraphy, their accuracy and capacity as individual tools for understanding deep time were diminished. In response, he and colleague Doug Erwin conceived the EARTHTIME Initiative, a community-based effort to foster collaboration across the disciplines and eliminate inter-laboratory and inter-technique biases. Bowring’s common refrain to members to “check our egos at the door” reflected his unwavering goal to push the accuracy of geochronology to new levels, and helped the initiative build consensus and develop best practices and protocols. EARTHTIME continues to lead international workshops, expanding beyond topics of calibration and standardization to engage with the broader geoscience community, seeking to understand the rock record in ever more refined and nuanced ways.

“If the art of geochronology is the rendering of dates in their proper geologic context, Sam is our Michelangelo,” former MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) department head and close friend and colleague Tom Jordan said of Bowring. “He has always insisted that knowing what you are dating and why are as important as fixing the date itself; that the precision of absolute dating is most powerful when samples can be placed precisely in section.”

Bowring’s interest in the applications of tracer isotopes to examine Earth systems also extended to their utility in tracking environmental contaminants. His lab has developed methods for not only tracing naturally-occurring sources and establishing natural regional baselines, but also for documenting variations which correlate with anthropogenic inputs associated with urbanization and industrialization.

A dedicated teacher and mentor

Bowring joined the faculty of EAPS at MIT in 1991 where, in addition to fostering the careers of over two dozen graduate students and postdocs, he demonstrated a career-long commitment to advancing undergraduate education. For more than 20 years Bowring served as a first-year and undergraduate advisor, eventually being named a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 2006 by the Institute program which recognizes faculty for, “exemplary and sustained contributions to the teaching and education of undergraduates at MIT,” and later earning the MIT Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2007. He was also deeply involved in helping to shape curricula, serving on the MIT Committee on Curriculum from 2007 to 2010. He also served as chair of the EAPS Program in Geology and Geochemistry from 1999 until 2002, at which time he became chair of the EAPS Undergraduate Committee, serving until 2015. As a field geologist, he took his keen interest in engaging students to off-campus venues, leading annual trips into the field which were fixtures in the department’s calendar — from western Massachusetts to Yellowstone to the Las Vegas desert.

“Sam was an exceptionally effective and dedicated undergraduate educator, having gone well ‘above and beyond’ for EAPS and our students,” recalls Grove. “He took on more undergraduate teaching than any other member of our department in the last 25 years and was deeply committed to the importance of training undergraduates in the field — providing students with hands-on experience and using real-world geology to inspire and teach fundamentals.”

Bowring also was instrumental in guiding Terrascope, a first-year learning community created jointly by EAPS and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2002. Bowring became associate director of the program in 2006, going on to serve as director from 2008 to 2015. The nationally-recognized program, which has been the subject of several academic papers and has grown to become one of MIT’s largest first-year communities, asks students with diverse research interests to tackle complex, global problems involving sustainability, climate, and the Earth system in a series of team-oriented, student-driven classes. In 2013, Bowring and his coauthors described the innovative curriculum by saying, “Our emphasis is on using a multidisciplinary approach to show that understanding the geosciences … is important to the students' world view, whether they know it or not. We believe it is our responsibility to teach as many students as we can about the Earth system, and in our experience, Terrascope students have a greatly expanded consciousness about the Earth and humans’ effect on it.”

Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Sept. 27, 1953, Bowring was raised in Durham, New Hampshire, where he also later attended the University of New Hampshire. After graduating in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in geology, he went on to study at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, where he earned a master’s in 1980.

At the University of Kansas, Bowring had the opportunity early on to work with PhD advisor Randall Van Schmus on a project in the Northwest Territories of Canada (NWT) — where he was first introduced to collaborator Hoffman — which laid the foundation for both his PhD and continuing studies in the NWT’s Proterozozoic Wopmay orogen after joining the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis (WU) in 1984. It was as an assistant professor at WU that Bowring made his seminal analysis of the Acasta gneiss from the region, along with Ian Williams from the Australian National University.

In addition to being named a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, Bowring, the Robert R. Schrock Emeritus Professor of Geology, was a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and was recognized by the organization with both the Norman L. Bowen Award and Walter H. Bucher Medal. He was also a fellow of both the Geochemical Society and the Geological Society of America.

He is survived by his wife of 30 years, Kristine M. (Fox) Bowring, two stepdaughters, Kelley Kintner and Sara Henrick, as well as his siblings, James Bowring, Joseph Bowring, and Margaret Ann Bowring-Price. At the family’s request, there will be no formal services.

Jack L. Kerrebrock, professor emeritus of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, died at home on July 19. He was 91.

Born in Los Angeles in 1928, Kerrebrock received his BS in 1950 from Oregon State University, his MS in 1951 from Yale University, and his PhD in 1956 from Caltech. With a passion for aerospace, he held positions with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, Caltech, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory before joining the faculty of MIT as an assistant professor in 1960.

Promoted to associate professor in 1962 and to full professor in 1965, Kerrebrock founded and directed the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Space Propulsion Laboratory from 1962 until 1976, when it merged with the department’s Gas Turbine Laboratory, of which he had become director in 1968. In 1978, he accepted the role of head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro).

Kerrebrock enjoyed an international reputation as an expert in the development of propulsion systems for aircraft and spacecraft. Over the years, he served as chair or member of multiple advisory committees — both government and professional — and as NASA associate administrator of aeronautics and space technology.

As associate director of engineering, Kerrebrock was the faculty leader of the Daedalus Project in AeroAstro. Daedalus was a human-powered aircraft that, on 23 April 1988, flew a distance of 72.4 miles (115.11 kilometers) in three hours, 54 minutes, from Heraklion on the island of Crete to the island of Santorini. Daedalus still holds the world record for human-powered flight. This flight was the culmination of a decade of work by MIT students and alumni and made a major contribution to the understanding of the science and engineering of human-powered flight.

Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1978, Kerrebrock was the recipient of numerous accolades, including election to the status of honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, as well as the Explorers Club and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, and Phi Kappa Phi, he received NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal in 1983. He was also a contributor to the Intergovernmental  Panel on Climate Change, which along with Al Gore won the Nobel Prize in 2007.

Although a luminary in his field, Kerrebrock — an enthusiastic outdoorsman — was perhaps never happier than when climbing a mountain, hiking a wilderness trail, or leading a group of young people through ice and snow to teach them independence and survival skills. He ran his first Boston Marathon in his early 50s on a whim, with no training, following that with several more marathons, including the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington.

Kerrebrock and his wife Crickett traveled widely, to destinations including South Africa, Scotland, Tuscany, Paris, and a very special trip to Canaveral for one of the last Space Shuttle launches, where he was able to introduce his wife to his friend Neil Armstrong, who was one of her heroes.

Kerrebrock was married to Rosemary “Crickett” Redmond (Keough) Kerrebrock for the last 12 years of his life. He was previously married for 50 years to the late Bernice “Vickie” (Veverka) Kerrebrock, who died in 2003. In addition to his wife, Kerrebrock leaves behind two children, Nancy Kerrebrock (Clint Cummins) of Palo Alto, California, and Peter Kerrebrock (Anne) of Hingham, Masachusetts; and five grandchildren, Lewis Kerrebrock, Gale Kerrebrock, Renata Cummins, Skyler Cummins, and Lance Cummins. He was preceded in death by his son Christopher Kerrebrock, brother Glenn, and sister Ann. He also is remembered fondly by the Redmond children, Paul J. Redmond Jr. and his partner Joe Palombo, Kelly Redmond and her husband Philip Davis, Maura Redmond, Meaghan Winokur and James Winokur and their children, Laine and Alicia.

A public memorial service is being planned at MIT and will be announced soon. In lieu of flowers, contributions in his memory may be made to the Jack and Vickie Kerrebrock Fellowship Fund, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 600 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139.