Daniel E. Rosner
L.W. Jones, Jr. Professor of Chemical Engineering
Daniel Rosner, BSME City College of New York, Ph.D. Princeton University, faculty member at Yale since 1969, you have an enviable interdisciplinary background in mechanical engineering, aeronautical engineering, chemical engineering, physical chemistry, and gas dynamics, which you have adeptly applied to high temperature chemical reaction problems. Your uncommon breadth of interests has made you a most consulted colleague, both in academia and industry. You have not only pursued a vast range of research topics, leading to over 240 journal articles, but have also masterfully turned your basic findings into correlations, generally applicable and widely used in engineering practice. You have provided exemplary educational service, through your award- winning book Transport Processes in Chemically Reacting Flow Systems, as well as other specifically pedagogical articles. For your lifetime achievements, you received the 1999 D. Sinclair Award from the American Association of Aerosol Research, and the 2011 Particle Technology Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
You founded the High Temperature Chemical Reaction Engineering Research Laboratory which pioneered a new class of low-pressure, transonic-flow, microwave-discharge chemical reactor techniques for studying the kinetics of dissociated gas/solid high-temperature reactions. This work provided a deep understanding of heterogeneous chemical reactions under extreme conditions, relevant to many emerging technologies, including the thermal protection design for NASA’s Space Shuttle. In addition to twice acting as Chair, you have served Yale’s Dept. of Chemical Engineering well through tirelessly honoring the memory of its most illustrious members. You continue to chair the Csaba Horvath Memorial Lecture Committee, and your “Short biography of Barnett Dodge on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth” serves as an invaluable historical record of Yale’s first great chemical engineer. Similarly, your public documentation of the achievements of John Fenn – and of the marriage made in Heaven between his electrospray and Horvath’s liquid chromatography work – is a gratifying public record of the success of Yale’s way of doing engineering.
Originally trained in art as well as engineering, your paintings depicting Yale’s campus, as well as your native New York, are greatly admired by your colleagues, and find themselves proudly displayed on many office walls! You literally combined art and engineering in an early paper: in addition to answering the question: [are the] “Plates of the Dinosaur Stegosaurus: [used as] Forced Convection Heat Loss Fins?” you drew your own very realistic image of the dinosaur for the cover of the journal Science. Let’s admit that few engineers could do that – and Yale –perhaps unsurprisingly for a University where the arts flourish –is proud to be one of them. Whether painting or writing, advancing science or sharing wisdom, with friends at Yale or family in California, we are profoundly grateful for your contributions, and wish you a retirement with more engineering and more art!
Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans