The following faculty members' elections to named professorships were approved by the Cornell Board of Trustees at its October meeting. The appointments became effective Nov. 1.
Donald L. Koch, associate professor of chemical engineering, has been elected the first Marjorie L. Hart Professor of Engineering. He will hold the chair for a four-year term.
The new professorship was created by Marjorie L. Hart '50 and her husband, Gurnee Hart. It is the first chair in engineering endowed by and honoring an engineering alumna. The department determined that the purpose of the gift could best be served by creating a chair awarded on a term basis.
Koch graduated in 1981 from Case Western Reserve University with both a B.S. in chemical engineering and a B.A. in history. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986. He joined the Cornell faculty in January 1987 and was advanced to associate professor in 1992. He was the Air Products Term Professor for 1998.
Since 1992 he has provided undergraduate research experiences for an average of four students each year. He plays an active role in the department in faculty hiring and the recruitment of graduate students. Currently he is adviser to 12 undergraduate students and teaches an undergraduate course in reaction kinetics and reactor design, a graduate course in advanced fluid mechanics and heat transfer and two chemical engineering seminars.
Koch is considered one of the leading researchers in fluid dynamics and the leader of a new generation of researchers in the rheology (flow and deformation) of complex fluids and particulate suspension mechanics. He received a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator award in 1988 and in the same year received the Frenkel Award from the American Physical Society for the best paper on the physics of fluids.
He is a member of the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the Society of Rheology.
Marjorie Hart is a lifetime member of the Cornell University Council, served as the council's vice-chair from 1979 to 1982 and as chair in 1986-87. She was named a presidential councillor in October 1996. She served on the Cornell Board of Trustees as an alumni-elected member from 1979 to 1984 and was reappointed for an additional year.
Until she established the new chair of engineering, Hart directed most of her Cornell gifts to the Marjorie L. Hart '50 Fund, which she established in August 1992 to support the women's programs in the College of Engineering.
After graduating from Cornell, Hart attended the New York University Graduate School of Business Administration. She had a long career with the Exxon Corp. and is now retired from her own firm, Business Line Consulting Co., which she founded in 1986.
Gurnee Hart is formerly managing director of Scudder, Stevens and Clark, investment counselors.
John O. McClain, professor of quantitative analysis at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, has been elected Emerson Electric Company Professor of Manufacturing Management at the Johnson School.
The professorship was established by the Emerson Electric Co. in 1989 and was previously held by Richard Conway, now an emeritus professor at the Johnson School.
McClain has earned national recognition for his expertise in operations research in manufacturing and service systems. His most recent research concerns management of work-sharing systems. Other areas of research include production and operations management, quality management and health systems management. In recognition of his research achievements, he was named a Mobil scholar in 1990 by the Mobil Foundation, and in 1995-96 he was the recipient of the Johnson School's Clifford Whitcomb Fellowship.
On the faculty at the Johnson School since 1970, McClain earned a B.S. from Washington State University, majoring in physics and graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude in 1964. Named as both a Woodrow Wilson fellow and Ford Foundation fellow, he went on to earn an M.S. in physics from Yale University in 1965 and a Ph.D. in administrative science and operations research from Yale in 1970.
At the Johnson School, McClain teaches courses in production and operations management. Statistics for Management, a core course he teaches, was recently given a top-10 ranking by Johnson School students. He was coordinator of the school's Program in Manufacturing Management from 1988 to 1992. He also coordinated the Sloan Program in Hospital and Health Service Administration at the school in 1980-81 (the program was shifted to the College of Human Ecology in 1984).
McClain is the author or co-author of six books, among them a definitive textbook on the subject of operations management, Operations Management: Production of Goods and Services (with Johnson School colleague L. Joseph Thomas and J. Mazzola; Prentice Hall, 1992). "XCELL+ Factory Modeling System," co-written with Cornell professors emeritus Conway and William Maxwell and Cornell Information Technologies staff member Steve Worona, appeared in 101 Success Stories of Information Technology in Higher Education: The Joe Wyatt Challenge (McGraw Hill, 1993). McClain also has helped develop several pieces of educational software.
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