News Release

Leal wins presigious Bingham Medal

Grant and Award Announcement

University of California, Santa Barbara - Engineering



Gary Leal, professor of chemical engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), has been selected as the recipient of the Society of Rheology's 2000 Bingham Medal.

Leal is being honored for his outstanding and wide-ranging accomplishments in rheology over the past 30 years but especially the last decade. Rheology is the study of the properties of materials which determine their response to mechanical force.

Leal’s work has concentrated on polymeric liquids, liquid crystalline polymers, and suspensions/emulsions. The results from his research group on the dynamics of droplets have laid the foundations for much of the present work on the rheology of blends and emulsions. He is an author of over 200 scientific papers and a textbook.

With a BS in chemical engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle and a PhD from Stanford, Leal went to Cambridge University for a postdoctoral fellowship in applied mathematics. He then accepted an appointment to the faculty at Caltech, where he was named to the Chevron Distinguished Professorship of Chemical Engineering in 1986.

Eleven years ago he joined the UCSB faculty and assumed chairmanship of the Chemical Engineering Department from 1989 to 1998. According to the Rheology Bulletin, "The pre-eminence of that department as one of the Centers of Chemical Engineering on an International scale is a fitting testimonial to Gary’s leadership and vision."

Elected to the U.S. Academy of Engineering, Leal has won a Guggenheim fellowship and the Colburn and Walker awards from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He is currently the co-editor of the Physics of Fluids, one of the two most prestigious journals in fluid mechanics.

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[Note, for a photograph of Professor Leal, go to http://www.engineering.ucsb. edu and follow the links to the press release and to the high-resolution version of the photo. Leal may be reached at 805-893-8510.]


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