Farewell
Adnan Al-Saffar (M.S.’61 CE, Ph.D.’64 CE) died in February at the age of 87. He had an extensive career as a chief hydraulic engineer at Bechtel and was instrumental in establishing ASCE’s Environmental & Water Resources Institute.
Robert Bellue (B.S.’58 CE) died in November at the age of 93. A U.S. Army veteran, he helped design canals in the Bakersfield area and was chief engineer for the Kern County Water Agency for 27 years.
Robert Boehm (Ph.D.’68 ME) died in October at the age of 83. His research advanced our understanding of heat transfer and renewable energy. A distinguished emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he also founded and served as the director of the Center for Energy Research.
Robert Brodersen, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences, died in February at the age of 78. A leader in the areas of RF and digital wireless communication design, he was a founding member of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center. Among his many honors, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He also was a mentor and beloved teacher to many.
Chin-Liang Chang (Ph.D.’67 EECS) died in September at the age of 86. He remained focused on artificial intelligence throughout his academic and professional career and later authored several books on the subject. Prior to founding Nicesoft Corporation, he worked at the National Institutes of Health, IBM and Lockheed-Martin.
Robert Clawson (B.S.’50 CE) died in September at the age of 97. A veteran of the U.S. Air Force, he worked at the California Department of Water Resources for over 50 years.
Gilles Corcos, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering, died in September at the age of 97. Trained as a Free French Air Force pilot during World War II, he had a long academic career. He later co-founded the NGO Agua Para La Vida to deliver water projects in Nicaragua and served as chairman for DiCon Fiberoptics.
Andrea Glerum (B.S.’97 CE) died in December at the age of 60. A civil engineer specializing in transportation, they worked for multiple Bay Area engineering firms before retiring from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
Michael Jordan (B.S.’56 CE, M.S.’61 CE) died in September at the age of 88. A veteran of the U.S. Navy Civil Engineer Corps, he founded Liftech Consultants Inc. and was one of the world’s pioneer designers of the first ship-to-shore container crane.
Christopher Kinzel (M.S.’66 CE) died in December. During his 64 years in the field of traffic engineering, he co-founded TJKM Transportation Consultants and mentored numerous engineers and planners.
Clyde Lee (Ph.D.’62 CE) died in October at the age of 94. A U.S. Army veteran, he was a professor emeritus in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where he had a 40-year career. His research included pioneering work in highway weigh-in-motion systems.
Larry Lewis (B.S.’62 CE) died in January at the age of 84. He served with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and had a long career as a structural engineer.
Newell Dee Lewis (B.S.’63 CE) died in October at the age of 83. He worked as an engineer for the city of Sacramento for over 31 years.
Wayne Lichtenberger, assistant professor of electrical engineering, died in October at the age of 90. A pioneer in computing research, he led the DARPA-funded Project Genie, which produced the first commercially successful time-sharing system. He also had a career in private industry, working for Hewlett-Packard, Ungermann-Bass, Cisco Systems and XKL.
Donald Machen (B.S.’59 EECS, M.S.’64 EECS) died in December at the age of 87. A veteran of the U.S. Naval Reserve, he developed accelerator control systems at Berkeley Lab and Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he had a long career. He also developed the first computer-control system used at CERN.
James Mitchell, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering, died in December at the age of 93. He held the Edward G. Cahill and John R. Cahill Chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, authored more than 375 publications and was most known for the geotechnical reference Fundamentals of Soil Behavior. His many honors include being elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.
William Mueller (B.S.’50 EECS; M.S.’53, Ph.D.’58 IEOR) died in January. He had a long career in corporate management at Hughes Aircraft Company.
Andrew Rudd (M.S.’72, Ph.D.’78 IEOR; MBA’76) passed away in April at the age of 74. He was the founder, CEO and chair of Barra Inc. as well as Advisor Software Inc. He was also a professor of finance and operations research at Cornell University, as well as the chair of the Rudd Family Foundation, which established Berkeley’s Big Ideas program, the V&A Café and the Rudd Family Foundation Chair in Safe Water and Sanitation, among other contributions.
James Skilling (B.S.’53 EECS) died in October at the age of 92. A veteran of the U.S. Navy, he worked many years at GenRad Inc. as an electrical engineer and served as a technical advisor to the U.S. Department of Commerce. He later taught computer science and statistics at the University of Maine.
Shirish Trivedi (M.S.’67 EECS) died in September at the age of 81. He had a long career at IBM as a computer engineer.
Roger Troxell (B.S.’51 CE, MEng ’55 CE) died in September at the age of 95. An officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, he spent most of his career at Oakland-based Kaiser Engineers, where he managed projects in the U.S. and abroad.
Theodore Van Duzer (Ph.D.’60 EECS), professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences, died in October at the age of 95. A former radio technician in the U.S. Navy, he spent more than 50 years on the faculty at Berkeley. He authored multiple books and was the founding editor of IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. He also was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.
Jack Welch (M.S.’58, Ph.D.’60 EngSci), professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences and of astronomy, died in March at the age of 90. A pioneer in molecular radio astronomy, his research led to discoveries in star formation and helped launch the field of astrochemistry. He served four decades on the faculty at Berkeley and was a founding member of the SETI Institute, where he played a pivotal role in the creation of the Allen Telescope Array. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Wilbur Wenger (M.S.’77 CE) died in January at the age of 79. He had a long career as an engineer in the oil and gas industry.
Niklaus Wirth (Ph.D.’63 EECS) died in January at the age of 89. An ACM Turing Award winner, he was renowned for the creation of several programming languages, including Pascal, and for the adage “Wirth’s Law,” which states that software tends to slow down more rapidly than hardware speeds up.
James Woodfill (B.S.’61 Metallurgy, M.S.’66 MSE) died in September at the age of 84. He worked for 32 years at Bechtel as a mechanical engineer.