Deaths |
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April 5, 2016, Volume 62, No. 29 |
Stuart W. Churchill, Engineering
Richard G. Lonsdorf, Psychiatry and Law
Yale Rabin, Urban Planning
Stuart W. Churchill, Engineering
Stuart W. Churchill, the Carl V. S. Patterson Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering and professor emeritus of biomolecular engineering at Penn, died on March 24. He was 95 years old.
Dr. Churchill was a leader in the fields of combustion, heat transfer and fluid dynamics for over half a century. He received BS degrees in both chemical engineering and mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1942, and went on to work at Shell Oil Company and Frontier Chemical. He returned to the University of Michigan in 1947 and became a member of the faculty after receiving his PhD in 1952. He served as chairman of the department of chemical & metallurgical engineering from 1962-1967. He was an active member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), serving as its president in 1966. In 2008, the AIChE designated him as one of the 100 most distinguished chemical engineers of the modern era.
In 1967, Dr. Churchill became the Carl V. S. Patterson Professor of Chemical Engineering at SEAS and earned one of Penn’s first Medals for Distinguished Achievement in 1993 (Almanac November 2, 1993). He also served as a visiting professor at Iowa State University, the University of Utah, Pennsylvania State University and Okayama University.
Dr. Churchill was awarded Penn Engineering’s S. Reid Warren, Jr. Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1978. He advised 25 doctoral students at Michigan and 20 at Penn. Every doctoral thesis involved a significant experimental component, in addition to heavy emphasis on mathematics, often involving digital computation. He authored several textbooks, including Interpretation and Use of Rate Data—the Rate Process Concept (1974), The Practical Use of Theory in Fluid Flow: Inertial Flows (1980) and Viscous Flows: The Practical Use of Theory (1988).
Dr. Churchill was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1974. In 2002, he received the NAE Founders Award for “outstanding leadership in research, education and professional service and for continuing contributions in combustion, heat transfer and fluid dynamics for over a half century.” His awards included the AIChE Professional Progress Award (1964), the William H. Walker Award (1969), the Warren K. Lewis Award (1978) and the Max Jakob Award in Heat Transfer (1979). He authored 215 papers and six books before retiring in 1990 and wrote 110 additional papers afterwards. On the occasion of his 80th birthday, he was honored with a symposium, a portrait (Almanac September 5, 2000) and a Festschrift in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research, a leading archival journal in chemical engineering.
Dr. Churchill is survived by his wife, Renate, and his children, Stuart L., Diana, Catherine and Emily. At his request, there will be no funeral; instead, his body will be contributed for scientific studies. Plans for a memorial service will be announced.
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Richard G. Lonsdorf, Psychiatry and Law
Richard G. Lonsdorf, professor emeritus of psychiatry and law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, died of congestive heart failure at the Waverly Heights retirement community in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, on March 18. He was 93 years old.
Dr. Lonsdorf was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Scranton in 1942. He then attended Penn’s medical school, which is now the Perelman School of Medicine, and graduated in 1946 at age 23. In the aftermath of World War II, he served with the Navy Medical Corps in Fort Worth, Texas. He then returned to Penn to complete training as a psychiatrist and, later, a psychoanalyst. He also ran a private psychiatry practice in his home and at an office in Center City Philadelphia.
He began teaching at Penn’s School of Medicine in 1952. In 1959, he took a secondary appointment at Penn’s Law School, where he helped to develop a course in forensic law that dealt with legal issues relating to the criminal mind. The course became a mainstay of the curriculum, and Dr. Lonsdorf taught it for more than 40 years to generations of Philadelphia lawyers and judges.
In 1982, he was promoted to clinical professor of psychiatry and law. During his time at Penn, he served on the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and the Committee on the Chronically Mentally Ill Homeless, a subgroup of the Mayor’s Public-Private Task Force on Homelessness.
Dr. Lonsdorf was one of the pioneering authorities on the use of the insanity defense in criminal cases. He lent his expertise to state and federal lawmakers who were crafting rules for the introduction of such evidence at trial. He often testified in court, including as a consulting psychiatrist in the legal challenges that followed the 1982 conviction of John Hinckley, Jr. for the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. Mr. Hinckley was found to be not guilty by reason of insanity.
Dr. Lonsdorf retired from Penn and took emeritus status in 1993.
He is survived by three sons, George (Deborah Holljes), David (Marilyn Chohaney) and Robert (Lino Aleylunas); four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His wife, Alice B. Lonsdorf, a former assistant dean for alumni affairs at Penn Law, died in 2014 (Almanac April 29, 2014). Donations in his memory may be made to the Sierra Club (http://www.sierraclub.org) or to the Nature Conservancy (http://www.nature.org).
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Yale Rabin, Urban Planning
Yale Rabin, a former urban planner at Penn, died of heart failure at his home at Foulkeways Retirement Community in Gwynedd, Pennsylvania, on March 22. He was 88 years old.
Mr. Rabin was born in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Trenton High School in New Jersey. He was a Coast Guardsman from 1946-1947, then earned his bachelor’s of fine arts in 1952 at the Tyler School of Fine Arts and his bachelor’s in education in 1953 at Temple University.
He was a ceramics teacher and public school art teacher until 1957, then earned his master’s in urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. He worked as a city planner in Camden, New Jersey, and in London, England.
Mr. Rabin returned to Philadelphia in 1963 and joined Penn’s staff as an urban planner. In 1964, he took a leave of absence to work on a construction project for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). During winter break in 1965, he used a gift from Penn’s Christian Association to take Penn students to build facilities in Mississippi for sharecroppers who had been evicted from their homes. He left Penn in 1967.
Until 1975, Mr. Rabin was a consultant and witness for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In 1976, he served as an expert plaintiffs’ witness in the court cases that successfully sought to provide affordable housing in Mount Laurel, New Jersey.
He was later associate dean for academic affairs in the urban & environmental planning department at the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mr. Rabin is survived by his wife, Barbara; two sons, Paul and Andrew; three daughters, Mira, Alix and Sarah Rabin-Lobron; three stepchildren, Judy, Sharon and Dan Wurtzel; eight grandchildren; and three step-grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. on April 17 at Foulkeways, 1120 Meetinghouse Road, Gwynedd, PA 19436.
Donations may be sent to a social justice organization of one’s choice. Condolences may be offered to the family at Foulkeways at the above address or at http://www.foulkeways.org |
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