Harmon Ray joins the active emeriti

Harmon Ray (27K JPG)

W. Harmon Ray entered a new phase of his career this past summer with his formal retirement after 27 years on the UW faculty, and a 37-year career in academia. Harmon began his career in 1966 as assistant professor at the University of Waterloo and moved to SUNY Buffalo in 1970. He has held visiting professorships at Cornell University, the University of Minnesota, the Technische Universität Stuttgart in Germany, Rijksuniversiteit Gent in Belgium, and University of Leuven, also in Belgium.

Over the course of his career, Harmon has achieved a level of research scholarship, as well as industrial and educational impact, that is universally admired. Today, the field of polymerization reaction engineering, Harmon's area of expertise, serves a huge industry that demands "close-to-the-edge" operating conditions in order to provide exacting control of product characteristics, to maintain safe operating conditions, to reduce environmental impacts and to control costs. Such operating conditions are not possible without sophisticated process models and control strategies.

The mathematical models and computer simulations that have emerged from over three decades of progress in Harmon's research program provide a clear picture of microscale mechanisms for the main classes of polymerization reactions. These models help to elucidate the links between observable variables and control parameters, and can show ways to achieve the industry's goals. The leading companies in the chemical process industry in the USA, Europe and Japan have followed Harmon's work closely. These same companies have joined his consortium, the University of Wisconsin Polymerization Reaction Engineering Laboratory (UWPREL), established in 1983, and a steady stream of visitors from industry insured a high technological impact to his work. As Harmon has said, "when you work on problems related to a quarter trillion dollar per year industry, someone cares about your results!" This is true, at least, when your results are as relevant and useful as Harmon's.

Over the years, these contributions have been widely recognized by his peers. Harmon has received several major awards and fellowships from professional societies including AIChE's Professional Progress Award for Outstanding Progress in Chemical Engineering, and the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award from the American Automatic Control Council. He has given named lectureships at Imperial College, Caltech, University of Illinois, and Purdue, among others, and has received honorary degrees from the University of Waterloo and the University of Minnesota. He has been a member of the National Academy of Engineering since 1991. Within the UW, Harmon's achievements have been recognized through the College of Engineering's Byron Bird Award for an Outstanding Research Publication, the Hilldale Award, and both the Steenbock Chair and Vilas Research Professorships.

Harmon has graduated 53 PhD students and over 30 MS students who have gone on to pursue distinguished careers in industry and academia, including one PhD student, Jim Rawlings, who is, of course, on the faculty of this department. To date, Harmon has coauthored or edited 262 papers and six books. His most recent book, Process Dynamics, Modeling and Control (with B.A. Ogunnaike, a 1981 Ray PhD) is a seminal treatment of process control and is now widely used as a textbook. Harmon's judgment is highly valued and is sought for many of the important positions in national service pertaining to research, including key committees of the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Engineering. He has also made a number of key service contributions to the UW, including a term on the Physical Sciences Divisional Committee and a stint as department chair.

As an emeritus professor, Harmon does not plan to take on more graduate students or teach regularly, and he certainly doesn't plan to attend those interminable faculty meetings. But he does plan to remain professionally active, focusing this phase of a most distinguished career on writing, personal research, and work with postdoctoral research associates.