In Memoriam
V. S. Arunachalam (1936 - 2023)
Collaborating Professor, Engineering and Public Policy, Robotics Institute, Materials Science and Engineering
Carnegie Mellon 1992-2023
Dr. V.S. Arunachalam, founder chairman of Bangalore-based think tank Center for Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP), passed away on August 16, 2023. His distinguished career spanned across Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, National Aeronautical Laboratory and Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory. Arunachalam worked as Secretary, Department of Defence Research and Development (Ministry of Defence, Government of India). He was also the Director General of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and served as the Scientific Adviser to defence minister, Government of India, from 1982 to 1992.
Arunachalam was granted the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan for his contributions to engineering science and technology. He was a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. Along with being the first Indian Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK), he was a Distinguished Service Professor (Engineering and Public Policy) at Carnegie Mellon University.
Select Publications
- V.S. Arunachalam and S. Mahajan, "The Role of Materials in Lightwave Communications," Zeitschrift Fur Metallkunde, December 1999.
- R. Tongia and V. S. Arunachalam, "India's Nuclear Breeders: Technology, Viability, and Options," Current Science, vol. 75, no. 6, 1998.
- V. S. Arunachalam and R. Reddy, "A Program for an Inter-University High Speed Data Network: A Report," Carnegie Mellon University, 1998.
Tung Au (1924 - 2022)
University Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering/Engineering and Public Policy
Ph.D. (Civil Engineering) 1951, University of IllinoisM.S. (Civil Engineering) 1948, University of Illinois
B.S. (Civil Engineering) 1943, St. John's University, Shanghai
Carnegie Mellon University, 1957 - 1992
During his time at Carnegie Mellon, Tung Au served the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Engineering and Public Policy with great distinction from 1957 until his retirement in 1992. Dr. Au taught and conducted research across a broad spectrum of civil engineering in his 35 years on the faculty, including applied mechanics, structural engineering, systems analysis and design, and construction project management. He received numerous honors throughout his career, including being recognized as an Honorary (Distinguished) Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1991.
Dr. Au received his BS degree from St. Johns University (China) in 1943; and his MS (1948) and PhD (1951) degrees from the University of Illinois, all in Civil Engineering. After working for several years as a structural engineer in consulting firms in Detroit, Michigan, he joined CEE as a faculty member in 1957. Dr. Au served as the Acting Head of Civil Engineering in 1970-1971 and again in 1985-1986.
He has authored or co-authored of seven books, including Elementary Structural Mechanics (1963), Introduction to Systems Engineering: Deterministic Models (with Thomas Stelson, 1969), Fundamentals of Systems Engineering: Probabilistic Models (with Richard Shane and Lester Hoel, 1972), Engineering Economics for Capital Investment Analysis (with Thomas Au, 1983, 1991), Structural Analysis (with Paul Christiano, 1987), Project Management for Construction (with Chris Hendrickson, 1989), and Fundamentals of Structural Analysis (with Paul Christiano, 1992).
Jared L. Cohon (1947 - 2024)
President Emeritus, Carnegie Mellon University
University Professor, Engineering and Public Policy
Carnegie Mellon 1997-2024
Dr. Jared L Cohon, the eighth president of Carnegie Mellon University who guided the university’s expansion toward national and international excellence, died peacefully on March 16, 2024.
During his tenure from 1997-2013, Carnegie Mellon grew into one of the world’s leading institutions of higher learning. But Cohon’s legacy extends beyond the development of CMU and its effect on the Pittsburgh region — Cohon is remembered as a genuine person who left his mark on all who crossed his path.
Cohon continued his impact at Carnegie Mellon even after his time as president, serving as a University Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy and director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation from 2014-2017.
Considered a national authority on environmental and water resource systems analysis, Cohon was a distinguished member of the National Academy of Engineering. Throughout his career he served on several government boards including the Atomic Energy Commission and Homeland Security Advisory Council as well as on a number of corporate and nonprofit boards, including the Carnegie Foundation and the American Association of Universities, which he at one time led as chair.
Born on Oct. 7, 1947, in Beachwood, Ohio, Cohon earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969 and a doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973, both in civil engineering. Later that year, he joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, where he went on to become assistant and associate dean of engineering and vice provost for research. From 1992 to 1997, Cohon served as dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, before being selected for the presidency of Carnegie Mellon.
As the university’s eighth president, Cohon balanced organizational goals with economic reality. He navigated Carnegie Mellon through a challenging period of financial pressure, focused on six strategic priorities — education for leadership, globalization, research, community and regional success, financial strength, and public perception — while continuing to look to the future.
Reflecting on Cohon's legacy, Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian said, "his brilliant mind, unyielding energy and unimpeachable integrity have made our institution — and our society — better in innumerable ways."
Otto "Toby" Davis (1934 - 2006)
WW Cooper University Professor of Economics and Public Policy
Carnegie Mellon, 1960 - 2006
With broad research interests and a self-declared disregard for disciplinary boundaries, Davis held joint appointments in the Heinz School, the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences' Department of Social and Decision Sciences. Known for his broad academic interests, Davis' research spanned several areas, including welfare economics, imperfect markets and the regulation of economic activity.
Davis was a founder and second dean of the School of Urban and Public Affairs (SUPA), now known as the Heinz School. He was a Carnegie Mellon faculty member since 1960, an innovator in economics and political science, and a beloved member of the campus community who served the university in many ways.
Representative Publications
Davis, Otto A., Hinich, Melvin J., and Ordeshook, Peter C., An Expository development of a mathematical model of the electoral process, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 64, No. 2, June 1970, 426-448.
Davis, Otto A., Dempster, M.A.H., Wildavsky, Arron, A theory of the budgetary process, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 60, No 3, September 1966, 5120-547.
Barr, James L., and Davis, Otto A., An elementary political and economic theory of the expenditures of local governments, Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 33, No 2, October 1966, 149-165.
Davis, Otto A., DeGroot, Morris H., and Hinich, Melvin, Social preference orderings and majority rule,Econometrica, Vol. 40, No. 1 January 1972, 147-157.
Davis, Otto A., and Whinston, Andrew, Externalities, welfare, and the theory of games, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 70, No. 3, June, 241-262.
Heinz School Memorial
Robert Dunlap (1938 - 2009)
Carnegie Mellon Trustee, Professor, and Founder of the Department of Engineering & Public Policy
As a member of Carnegie Mellon's Board of Trustees, Dunlap served on the Executive Committee and was chair of the Research and Technology Commercialization Committee. He was also a co-chair of the advisory boards for the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering and Public Policy, and Materials Science and Engineering.
From 1967 to 1977, Dunlap was a professor at Carnegie Mellon, where he was co-director of the program in technology and humanities and co-chairman of the program in engineering and public policy, of which he was a founder. He began his career as an associate scientist at General Atomic Company.
More recently, Dunlap was a consulting principal for EFCG, Inc., a New York city-based firm supplying investment banking, financial and consulting services to the engineering service industry. Previously, he spent 13 years as president, CEO, and director of RETEC, Inc., an environmental engineering and management professional service firm. From 1977 to 1985, he held various executive positions at Environmental Research & Technology and Modar, Inc., and was a visiting professor at Harvard University.
Lester B. Lave (1939 - 2011)
University Professor; The Harry B. and James H. Higgins Professor of Economics and Finance; Professor, Engineering and Public Policy and Heinz College; Director, Green Design Initiative
B.A. (Economics) 1960, Reed College
Ph.D. (Economics) 1963, Harvard University.
Carnegie Mellon, 1963 - 2011
Professor Lester Lave’s work was broad in its focus - he examined the risk analysis of management, including air pollution, carcinogenicity of chemicals, safety of dams, and highway safety; and product and process design for the environment, including life-cycle analysis. With his student Eugene Seskin he published seminal work on the impacts of air pollution on human health, establishing the link between fine particles and mortality and eventually led to particulate air quality standards and emission regulations that will continue to save lives far into the future. Lave was recognized for his air pollution and public health work with election to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in 1982.
With colleagues Granger Morgan, Alex Farrell, and Jay Apt, Lave founded Carnegie Mellon’s Electricity Industry Center in 2001, which today is the largest interdisciplinary group working on all aspects of the electric power industry. During the 1980s, he contributed his expertise in the areas of risk analysis arena, automobile safety, dam design, diabetic truck drivers, fuel additive risks, and global climate change were but a few of the topics addressed in research by Lester and his students.
With colleagues Hendrickson and McMichael, Lave founded the Green Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon in 1992. This interdisciplinary center provided new approaches to pollution prevention and waste minimization. With numerous students, the group developed an inputoutput approach to make environmental life cycle assessment both consistent and rapid. They also had their share of controversy, such as their study of lead emissions from the life-cycle of lead-acid battery powered vehicles, which appeared in The New York Times and eventually the journal Science, entitled ‘Environmental Implications of Electric Cars.’ This article disparaged the use of lead-acid batteries and production of primary and secondary lead due to what they said are harmful emissions.
Lave served on, and chaired, numerous study committees of the National Academies (NRC). More recently he chaired the Academy report "Real Prospects for Energy Efficiency in the United States" that demonstrated large opportunities for saving energy by improving buildings. At the time of his death he was chairing an Academy committee on whether and how to make motor fuels from biomass.
Lave was a dedicated educator. He supervised roughly 40 Ph.D. and post-doctoral students, many of whom have gone on to make important contributions of their own in environmental science and technology. Many of the MBA students he taught have played important roles in the greening of U.S. and international industry. CEOs of several of the nation’s best-managed companies are his former students.
Lester was prescient in picking important problems and applying rigorous analysis. He was also exemplary in ignoring disciplinary boundaries. As a result, his legacy in a variety of important topics is enormous.
Francis C. McMichael (1937 - 2018)
Walter J. Blenko, Senior Professor of Environmental Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering / Engineering and Public Policy
Ph.D. (Civil Engineering, Minor in Geophysics) 1963, California Institute of Technology- M.S. (Geophysics) 1959, California Institute of Technology
- B.S. (Mining Engineering) 1958, Lehigh University
Carnegie Mellon, 1967-2002
Professor McMichael has worked extensively on applying material and energy-balance approaches to the study of environmental problems. In recent work he has applied concurrent engineering concepts to the design of products and processes to mitigate environmental impacts over their life cycle. Professor McMichael is developing methodologies and design advisors for process engineering, such as size reduction and materials separation for products such as automobiles, computers, consumer durables, and electronics.
Another current area of interest involves the management of residue from automobile shredders. An increasing weight fraction of the shredded hulk of a modern automobile is deemed a hazardous or special waste. Techno-economic investigation of alternative processes address finding value in recovered materials, reducing the cost of disposal, and mitigating the environmental impact of residuals.
Representative Publications
- F. C. McMichael and C. Hendrickson, "Recycling Batteries," IEEE Spectrum, vol. 35, no. 2, 1998.
- C. T. Hendrickson, A. Horvath, S. Joshi, M. Klausner, L. B. Lave and F. C. McMichael, "Comparing Two Life Cycle Assessment Approaches: A Process Model vs. Economic Input-Output Based Assessment," Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment, San Francisco, CA, 1997.
- L. C. Lave, C. Hendrickson and F. C. McMichael, "Environmental Implications of Electric Vehicles," Science, vol. 268,- pp. 993-995, 1995. Reprinted in H. Kukuck (ed./Hg.),StromDiskussion, The Future of the Electric Vehicle, Informationien zur Elecktrizitat, Frankfurt, Germany, 1996.
Henry Piehler (1938 - 2016)
Professor, Engineering and Public Policy, Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering
Piehler's materials research included sheet metal formability, and triaxial consolidation of powder compacts and composite materials, which facilitates consolidation and improve properties compared to those achieved by pure isostatic compaction. Other materials research focused on fabrication and performance of surgical materials and devices, using in vivo tests designed to link prior processing with in vivo performance. He developed nondestructive testing procedures to predict incipient failures, as well as risk-management and regulatory strategies designed to respond to these performance evaluations.
His policy research focused on the career paths of Japanese and American engineers, in order to understand how the generation and dissemination of technical information occurs in these two countries. Professor Piehler's research included physical and analytical modeling of deformation processing systems and performance evaluation of mechanically fabricated components and products in research areas like medical device risk management, engineering manpower utilization, plus productivity and innovation.
Professor Piehler was on several committees of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), including the Committee on Medical and Surgical Materials and Devices.
Representative Publications
H. Hampel, L. G. Hector, N. T. Nuhfer and H. R. Piehler, "Evolution of UHMWPE Wear Debris During Single Asperity Plowing," Transactions of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Orthopedic Research Society, New Orleans, LA, 1998, p. 365.
H. R. Piehler and D. P. DeLo, "Physical Modeling of Powder Consolidation Processes," Progress in Materials Science, vol. 42, 1997, pp. 263-276.
L. H. Lynn, H. R. Piehler and M. Kieler, "Engineering Careers, Job Rotation, and Gatekeepers in Japan and the United States," Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, vol. 10, 1993, pp. 53-72.
Herbert L. Toor (1927 - 2011)
Emeritus Mobay Professor, Chemical Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy
B.S. (Chemical Engineering) 1948, Drexel Institute of Technology.M.S. (Chemical Engineering) 1950 and Ph.D. (Chemical Engineering) 1952, Northwestern University.
Carnegie Mellon, 1953 - 2011
Professor Toor's teaching and research have been primarily in mainstream chemical engineering. He was Head of the Chemical Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon, and subsequently Dean of Carnegie Institute of Technology. During the early days of the environmental movement, Professor Toor, Bob Dunlap (later the first Head of EPP), Mike Massey (the first joint Ph.D. from EPP), and Dave Ragone ran a project course to examine air-borne emissions in Pittsburgh - the precursor of the EPP project course.
After he became Dean of CIT, Professor Toor asked Bob Dunlap to develop a program to bring policy issues into engineering education and research. Bob Dunlap decided that collaboration with social scientists was needed, and, jointly with Gordon Lewis of the School of Urban and Public Affairs, wrote a proposal to start a program which was funded by the Sloan Foundation and which eventually became EPP.
Professor Toor's research has included studies concerned with extracting oil from oil shale and removing SO2 from stack gases, as well as fundamental studies in heat and mass transfer. He chaired the Committee on Evaluation of Sulfur Oxides Control Technology of the National Academy of Sciences.
Professor Toor is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, American Chemical Society, and American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), and a Fellow of the AIChE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Representative Publications
H. L. Toor, "Turbulent Reactive Mixing of Reversible Reactions," American Institute of Chemical Engineers Journal, vol. 43, no. 2, 1997, pp. 303-310.
H. L. Toor, "Intensity of Segregation Revisited," American Institute of Chemical Engineers Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, 1997, pp. 263-264.
M. L. Hanks and H. L. Toor, "Relative Importance of Macro- and Micromixing in Turbulent, Reacting Jets," I&EC Research, vol. 34, 1995, pp. 3252-3256.