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mit

Dr. Robert A. Brown

Symposium to honor Robert A. Brown:
A day of reflections by colleagues and former students

Friday, December 9, 2005
1:00PM - 5:30PM
MIT Bartos Theatre (E15-070)

On the afternoon of Friday, December 9, the MIT Chemical Engineering Department held a Symposium to honor Robert A. Brown for his tremendous contributions through research, education, and service to MIT, to the profession of chemical engineering, and to the fields of fluid mechanics and crystal growth.

From 1:00 -5:30 pm a technical symposium was held at MIT in Bartos Theatre (E15-070), featuring several reviews and projections about areas in which Bob has worked, given by his colleagues and former students. Current Department Head, Bob Armstrong, along with two of Bob's former students, Gareth McKinley (MIT) and Jeff Derby (Minnesota), helped organize this event.

Bob is one of the most prominent academic researchers in the world in the analysis of heat and mass transport and fluid mechanics. He has made seminal contributions to a number of important research problems. In addition to the development of novel, robust, and stable algorithms for numerical simulation of viscoelastic flows and melt crystal growth processes, Bob's work promoted advances in the fundamental understanding of physical phenomena ranging from flow transitions in viscoelastic fluids to convection, segregation, and defect dynamics in semiconductor crystal growth. He has also had a profound impact on almost every aspect of the Chemical Engineering Department and the Institute. He has played a leading role in bringing many of our current faculty to MIT. He set exceptionally high standards for teaching and research and, in doing so, succeeded in ratcheting up the already high standards of the department.

Robert A. Brown Biography:

Robert A. Brown, Ph.D., 10th president of Boston University , is a distinguished scholar of chemical engineering and an innovative leader in higher education. He assumed the presidency of Boston University in September 2005.

Dr. Brown, 54, a Texas native, earned a B.S. and an M.S. in chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin . He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota .

Prior to his appointment at Boston University , Dr. Brown was provost and Warren K. Lewis Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and numerous other prestigious professional societies.

In 1979, Dr. Brown joined the faculty of MIT as assistant professor. During the last 25 years, he advanced his scholarly and administrative career, serving as co-director of the MIT Supercomputer Facility, Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Dean of Engineering. In 1998, Dr. Brown was appointed Provost of MIT.

Dr. Brown has published approximately 250 papers in areas related to mathematical modeling of phenomena associated with materials processing, fluid mechanics of viscoelastic fluids, interface morphology, and modeling of semiconductor processing. He has served as consultant to major international corporations and to governments. He was named a 2005 Honorary Citizen for his service to the government of Singapore .

During his tenure at MIT, Dr. Brown led the creation of multi-disciplinary research centers including the McGovern Institute for Brain Research; the Broad Institute, a world-renowned genomics research collaboration with Harvard University, its affiliated hospitals and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research; and the development of the Ray and Maria Stata Center as a facility for teaching, research and student life focused on computer, information and intelligence sciences. Dr. Brown also oversaw the creation of the Biological Engineering Division and the Division of Engineering Systems as new interdisciplinary units in teaching and research.

Dr. Brown lives in Brookline , Massachusetts , with his wife Beverly, a health care professional with a doctorate in biochemistry. They have two grown sons.