CLEVELAND -- Simon Ostrach, the Wilbur J. Austin Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Posted 7-19-01
CLEVELAND -- Simon Ostrach, the Wilbur J. Austin Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ostrach has made preeminent contributions to the field of engineering and to the understanding of natural convection and microgravity flows. His primary research interest is the effects of weightlessness on the behavior of fluids and how flows -- which occur in nature and various technologies -- are induced or affected by body forces.
This year's class of the academy fellows is composed of 185 fellows, along with 26 foreign honorary members from 15 nations. Other members of the academy from CWRU include Frederick Robbins, emeritus professor of pediatrics and community health, and emeritus dean of the CWRU School of Medicine who was inducted into the Academy in 1972, and Lynn Landmesser, chair of CWRU's Department of Neurosciences. Ostrach will attend a formal induction ceremony in October in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
John Adams, James Bowdoin, and John Hancock were among the founders of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences during the American Revolution. According to the academy, its purpose is "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people."
Now in its 221st year, the academy has 3,700 fellows and 600 foreign honorary members who reflect a range of disciplines: mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, medicine, the social sciences and humanities, business, government, public affairs, and the arts. Among its fellows are 160 Nobel Prize laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners.
Other fellows over the academy's many years include distinguished scientists, scholars and leaders in public affairs, business, administration and the arts: George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Alexander Graham Bell in the19th century, and Albert Einstein, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Steinmetz, and Samuel Elliot Morison in the 20th century. Foreign members have included Jawaharla Nehru, Albert Schweitzer, and Andrei Sakharov.
Ostrach is a double alumnus of the University of Rhode Island, having received his B.S. in mechanical engineering in 1944, and his M.E. in 1949. He received two degrees in advanced mathematics from Brown University-the Sc.M. in 1949 and Ph.D. in 1950.
He joined the Case Institute of Technology (now the Case School of Engineering) in 1960 as professor of engineering, and in 1960 also was appointed head of the Division of Fluid, Thermal, and Aerospace Sciences. Prior to that, he was an aeronautic and research scientist for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, a research associate at Brown University, and chief of the fluid Physics Branch at NASA Lewis Research Center. In 1970, Ostrach was named to the Austin Chair at CWRU.
In 1993, NASA awarded Ostrach its Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest honor NASA confers on someone who is not employed by the government. He was honored for his extensive contributions to NASA space science, including pioneering research into the behavior of fluids in low gravity, public advocacy of U.S. efforts to conduct science experiments in space, and the development of two successful space experiments.
Ostrach was the principal investigator of the Surface Tension Driven Convection experiment conducted on board the United States Microgravity Laboratory-I (USML-1) in 1992 and USML-2 in 1995. The experiments collected scientific data on the convective flows created by the surface tension of fluids in a low-gravity environment.
Ostrach is currently completing his second four-year term as home secretary of the National Academy of Engineering and is a member of its program advisory board. He is also a member of the National Research Council Board of Governors, and has been a member of its executive committee, the Pace Studies Board Committee and its executive committee, and the Ohio Science and Engineering Round Table, among others.
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology awarded Ostrach an honorary doctorate in 1986. He also received honorary doctorates from Florida State University in 1994, the University of Rhode Island in 1995, and Brown University in 1997.
