Return to Articles	Release: 8-02-01

TWO CCNY FACULTY MEMBERS ELECTED TO AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

CUNY Distinguished Professor of Physics at City College, Herman Z. Cummins, and Morton M. Denn, CCNY's Albert Einstein Professor and Director of the Benjamin Levich Institute for Physico-Chemical Hydrodynamics, have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The two professors were among 185 Fellows and 26 Foreign Honorary Members elected to membership in the Academy recently. They will be formally nducted in ceremonies at the House of the Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 2001.

Professors Cummins and Denn join a distinguished membership of more than 4,000 Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members nationwide, and throughout the world, who have been recognized for their contributions to the sciences, scholarship, public affairs, and the arts. Professor Cummins is one of seven physicists elected to the Academy this year, while Professor Denn is among six engineers who will be inducted.

Founded in 1780 by John Adams and other leaders of post-colonial United States, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences was created as a learned society to "cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people."

(For more than two centuries, the Academy has brought together America's leading figures from universities, government, business, and the creative arts to exchange ideas and promote knowledge in the public interest. The Academy addresses issues of intellectual consequence to the nation through interdisciplinary and collaborative projects and publications. Following are bios of Dr. Cummins and Dr. Denn:

Herman Z. Cummins: Before his recent election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Cummins was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1996. His election to the Academies was in recognition of his original research in the use of lasers to study materials. He describes his work as basically learning how to develop and manage materials through better understanding of their properties. Dr. Cummins is credited with several major contributions to science. These include the development of laser Doppler velocimetry, and laser measurement of diffusion constants, which are widely used in the study of aircraft design and fluid flows.

Dr. Cummins received his BS degree in Engineering Physics, and an MS in Physics from Ohio State University before attending the University of Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1956. He obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University, where he began his seminal work with Charles Townes in laser-related research.

The author of over a hundred scientific papers, Professor Cummins has received numerous academic and professional honors for his research. These include the Maryland Academy of Science's Outstanding Young Scientist Award, The Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and a von Humboldt Senior Research award.

He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society. A CUNY Distinguished Professor at CCNY since 1974, Professor Cummins was the founding Vice President of the CUNY Academy for the Sciences and Humanities, and has been an organizer of several international symposia on light scattering. He was the co-organizer of three USA-USSR Light Scattering Symposia, and has also served as the co-organizer and co-director of two NATO Advanced Study Institutes.

Morton M. Denn: A member of the National Academy of Engineering since 1986, Dr. Denn's current research concerns the flow and processing of complex fluids, including polymers and liquid crystals, and the physics of interactions at polymer interfaces. He was recently appointed as the Albert Einstein Professor and the Director of the Benjamin Levich Institute for Physico-Chemical Hydrodynamics at CCNY. Dr. Denn received a BSE from Princeton University in 1961 and a Ph.D. from theUniversity of Minnesota in 1964, both in chemical engineering.

He served on the chemical engineering faculty of the University of Delaware from 1965 to 1981, where he was the Allan P. Colburn Professor from 1977 to 1981, and on the chemical engineering faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 1999, where he was Department Chair from 1991 to 1994. He was also the Program Leader for Polymers and Composites (1983 - 1999) and the Head of Materials Chemistry in the Materials Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (1995 - 1998). He currently holds a joint appointment in Chemical Engineering and Physics at City College.

Dr. Denn has been a visiting professor at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Melbourne, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Fulbright Lectureship; the Bingham Medal of the Society of Rheology; the Chemical Engineering Lectureship Award of the American Society for Engineering Education; and the Professional Progress, William H. Walker, Warren K. Lewis, and Institute Lectureship Awards of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE).

He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Minnesota earlier this year. Dr. Denn is the author of five textbooks and over 160 book chapters and research papers. He was the Editor of the AIChE Journal from 1985 to 1991, and he has been the Editor of the Journal of Rheology since 1995. He serves on numerous editorial boards and university and national laboratory advisory committees.

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