Named Professorships

The following elections to named positions in the College of Engineering became effective Feb. 1 of this year.

W. Mark Saltzman, professor with indefinite tenure, School of Chemical Engineering, has been named the BP Amoco/H. Laurance Fuller Professor of Chemical Engineering.

Saltzman is a leader in biomedical engineering, noted for developing polymers that can serve as carriers of large organic molecules, including DNA and proteins, to deliver drugs or vaccines with "timed release" over a period of weeks or months. Most recently his research group developed a method of incorporating a protein known as nerve growth factor into tiny particles that can be implanted in the brain as a possible treatment for Alzheimer's disease, along with soluble polymer "scaffolds" on which new cells can grow. He has worked on similar techniques for the delivery of cancer-fighting drugs to tumor sites. Meanwhile, he has developed laboratory methods to simulate living tissue in order to study the mechanisms of drug transport at release sites. The work is described in his book, Drug Delivery, which was published in February 2001 by Oxford University Press.

Saltzman graduated from Iowa State University in 1981, received his M.S. degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984 and his Ph.D. from MIT and Harvard University, Division of Health Sciences and Technology, in 1987. He is a member of Sigma Xi and a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers. In 2000, he was presented with the Professional Progress in Engineering Award by Iowa State University.

He has received the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Award, Distinguished Faculty Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education, Allan C. Davis Medal as Maryland's outstanding young engineer and the Controlled Release Society Young Investigator Award.

The BP Amoco/H. Laurance Fuller Professorship was established in June 2000 to enable the School of Chemical Engineering to extend its performance in research, teaching and scholarship into new areas. This professorship may be awarded for a set term, or the tenure of the holder, to recognize current faculty or attract new faculty. In this case it is awarded for Saltzman's full tenure.

Harold G. Craighead, professor with indefinite tenure, School of Applied and Engineering Physics, has been named to the Charles W. Lake Jr. Professorship in Productivity.

Craighead received his B.S. degree from the University of Maryland in 1974 and his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1980. He then joined Bell Laboratories as a member of the technical staff, working in device physics research. In 1984 he transferred to Bell Communications Research, where he established and became manager of the Microstructure Science Research Group. He returned to Cornell in 1989 as a professor in applied and engineering physics and as director of the National Nanofabrication Facility (now the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility), until 1995. He served as director of the School of Applied and Engineering Physics from 1998 through 2000 and has been director of the Nanobiotechnology Center since its founding early last year. He is a member of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America and the American Vacuum Society.

Craighead's research group focuses on the new science and applications of nanometer-scale devices and structures. Making use of the fact that nanotechnology can create devices with features similar in size to large biological molecules, they have fabricated devices that can measure and manipulate DNA, proteins and other molecules of life. They also study the physics of ultra-small structures and the application of these advances to the fields of optics, magnetism and biology.

The Charles W. Lake Jr. Professorship in Productivity was established in the College of Engineering in 1983 with gifts from Charles W. Lake Jr. and R.R. Donnelly & Sons Corp. to be dedicated to the teaching and development of methods for increasing the quantity and quality of jobs and services available to people. The professorship is to be held by an individual of recognized stature in an area or areas of knowledge that directly relate to modern manufacturing or process engineering. An overriding objective of the Lake Professorship is that the individual educate a continuing flow of Cornell engineers who are both conversant in and committed to the enhancement of manufacturing or process technology.

The incumbent to this chair is Herbert B. Voelcker, who retired on Jan. 1, 2000.

Christopher K. Ober, professor with indefinite tenure, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has been named the Francis Norwood Bard Professor of Metallurgical Engineering.

Ober earned his B.Sc. degree at the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1978 and his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1982. He joined the College of Engineering at Cornell in 1986. He currently is director of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and is one of the founding faculty members of the Nanobiotechnology Center.

He is recognized internationally as an expert on polymers -- substances in which identical molecules join in long repeating macromolecular structures to form useful solid or semi-solid materials. Ober and his group are working on "self-organizing" polymers that arrange themselves into structures using processes similar to those used by living systems. The uses of these materials range from biomedical to microelectronics. For example, he has invented a fluorinated liquid crystal polymer with a surface more water repellant than Teflon. These materials are intended for non-toxic, non-fouling coatings for marine environments. Other studies involve the creation of ordered polymers that are electrically conductive, also known as synthetic metals.

The Francis Norwood Bard Professorship of Metallurgical Engineering was established in 1944 by Francis Norwood Bard '04. Enriching Cornell's metallurgical engineering program was one of Bard's primary goals. His early connection with the steel industry and his experience as an engineering student made him acutely aware of the need for more scientific research and better instruction in the field of metallurgy. His appreciation for this need inspired him to endow this professorship. Bard was president of Barco Manufacturing Co. of Barrington, Ill., for more than 50 years. He also gave the engineering college Bard Hall, dedicated in 1963, in which, incidentally, Ober has his office.

Michael C. Kelley, professor with indefinite tenure, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been named the James A. Friend Family Distinguished Professor of Engineering.

Kelley received his B.S. degree from Kent State University, where he held an athletic scholarship, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California-Berkeley. After postdoctoral research at Berkeley, he held a joint appointment with Gerhard Haerendel as a Von Humboldt fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute in Garching, Germany, then came to Cornell in 1975. He was appointed associate dean for professional development in the College of Engineering for a three-year period, beginning in January 1999. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and in 1979 he won that society's James B. Macelwane Award. Kelley has been a member of the National Academy of Science's Committee on Solar and Space Plasmas; the Management Working Group on Solar Space Plasmas of the NASA Office of Space Science; and the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee on the Atmospheric Research Program. In 1981 he won the Tau Beta Pi-Cornell Society of Engineers award as the outstanding teacher in the Cornell College of Engineering. In 1998 he was named a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell.

Kelley studies the upper atmosphere and near-space regions, using sounding rockets and ground-based radars, including the facilities of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, to measure wind and wave patterns from 30 to several hundred kilometers above the surface of the earth. In 1983 he led the NASA Condor project that launched sounding rockets off the coast of Peru, while Cornell personnel manned the Jicamarca radar facility east of Lima to compare radar and rocket measurements. Similar projects were carried out in Greenland, the South Pacific and Puerto Rico. Currently Kelley is chairing a 10-year National Academy of Sciences study of the upper atmosphere from 60 kilometers out to the solar wind.

He also is one of the founders of Academic Excellence Workshops at Cornell, in which students attack problems in physics and mathematics in small collaborative groups.

The James A. Friend Family Distinguished Professorship of Engineering was established in 1980 to be used for the general support of a professorship in the College of Engineering. This professorship is intended to be a senior position in the college.

Kenneth E. Torrance, professor with indefinite tenure, Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has been named the Joseph C. Ford Professor.

After receiving his undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees from the University of Minnesota, finishing in 1966, Torrance held a joint appointment with the Fire Research Section of the National Bureau of Standards and the Factory Mutual Engineering Corp. in Norwood, Mass. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1968, working both in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Program of Computer Graphics. During 1974-75, he held a fellowship in the Advanced Study Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

His research focuses on heat transfer, fluid mechanics and computer graphics. Past activities at Cornell include collaborative work in several fields, including combustion, geology, atmospheric sciences, food science, and agricultural, civil and electrical engineering. Current activities focus on the development of highly-realistic synthetic images in computer graphics. The resulting methodology (known as "radiosity") is widely used in computer graphics and remote sensing. Torrance has established a measurement laboratory to study the radiometric properties of surfaces and light sources, testing synthetic computer-generated images against actual photographs.

He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Physical Society and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 1994 he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award. He has been recognized for his teaching with the Engineering Co-op Excellence in Teaching Award, the Dennis G. Shepherd Teaching Prize and the J.P. and Mary Barger '50 Teaching Award from the College of Engineering.

In 1958 the Joseph C. Ford Professorship was established through a bequest under the will of Vera Veerhusen Ford. The endowment provides a distinguished professorship in mechanical engineering, which Mrs. Ford requested be awarded to "persons of the highest competence." The Ford Professorship is dedicated to the memory of Mrs. Ford's husband, a 1911 graduate of Cornell. Joseph Curtis Ford was a manufacturing executive who served as director of Wisconsin Telephone, the First National Bank (Madison) and Ray-O-Vac Co. and was the founder and chairman of the Madison Community Trust.

Wilfried H. Brutsaert, professor with indefinite tenure, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been named the William L. Lewis Professor in Engineering.

Brutsaert received his B.Eng. degree in 1958 at the State University of Ghent, Belgium, and M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of California-Davis in 1960 and 1962, respectively. During sabbaticals and short-term leaves, he has worked at government and university laboratories in New York City, Israel, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan. He was director of graduate studies of civil engineering at Cornell for several years and currently is a member of the Faculty Senate.

Brutsaert studies hydrology and fluid mechanics in the environment. He has been developing methods to calculate regional evaporation and turbulent heat exchange from natural land surfaces with different types of land cover, using measurements made in the upper atmosphere by balloon-borne radiosondes, radar and sodar and observations from aircraft and satellites. The work is applied in watershed hydrology, climate dynamics with global circulation modeling and environmental monitoring from satellites. He also studies the interaction between rivers and adjacent underground aquifers to predict available water supply and water quality.

Brutsaert is a member of Phi Kappa Phi, a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, a member the National Academy of Engineering, the American Society of Civil Engineers and the International Association of Hydrologic Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and was president of its Hydrology Section in 1992-1994. He received the Ray K. Linsley Award from the American Institute of Hydrology in 1993 and the American Geophysical Union's Robert E. Horton Award in 1988 and Robert E. Horton Medal in 1999. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Ghent in 1995 and received the Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award from the University of California-Davis in 1995.

The William L. Lewis Professorship in Engineering was established in 1979 as a result of a residuary trust created by the will of William L. Lewis, ME '22. Lewis was a longtime employee of IBM, where he rose to the position of vice president for purchasing. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was deeply involved with the Cornell Fund and served as National Chairman of Leadership Gifts. He died in 1973.