Howard Malmstadt
Howard Malmstadt has to be included
in any list of our heroes. A mentor, a leader, a widely-respected
scientist and educatior, and a man with a passion for God and all the
people He created. But to many of us he was a humble, loving
friend.
Here's what the Department
of Chemistry University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign has to say about him:
(for
other info on
Dr. Malmstadt -
and books he's
written - see links below.)
Emeritus Professor of Chemistry Howard
Vincent
Malmstadt passed away on Monday, July 7, 2003 while on a visit to
Hawaii from his home in Michigan. Malmstadt, who was on the faculty of
the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois from 1951 to
1981, was widely considered the father of modern electronic and
computerized instrumentation in chemistry.
Malmstadt was born in
Marinette, Wisconsin, on February 17, 1922. He received his B.S. degree
from the University of Wisconsin in 1943, carrying out undergraduate
research in organic chemistry under Professor A. Wilds. Upon
graduation, he was commissioned as an ensign in the US Navy and
attended naval electronics and radar schools at Princeton, MIT, Bell
Labs, San Diego Fleet School, and Pearl Harbor. From 1944 to 1945, he
served as a navy lieutenant aboard the USS Wilkes DD441, destroyer
division in the Pacific, as a radar officer, and upon returning to the
States was supervisor for the Department of Electronics Fundamentals at
the Naval Radar School on Treasure Island, California.
After being released from
the Navy with the rank of senior lieutenant in 1946, he returned to the
University of Wisconsin for graduate work and received an M.S. degree
in 1948 and a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 1950 for his thesis "High
Frequency Titrations." His graduate work was conducted under the
direction of Walter J. Blaedel. The following year he remained at
Wisconsin as a post-doctoral research associate.
He joined the faculty at the
University of Illinois as an instructor in 1951, and was promoted to
assistant professor in 1954, to associate professor in 1957, and to
full professor in 1962. Malmstadt's major areas of research were in
emission and absorption spectrochemical methods, precision null-point
potentiometry, automatic titrations, and automation of analytical
methods. He is generally considered to be the father of modern
electronic analytical instrumentation. He introduced thousands of
scientists to electronic methods of scientific data collection through
his book "Electronics for Scientists" (co-written with his former
student C. G. Enke). With Enke, he developed and taught both
one-semester and three-week summer courses on electronic
instrumentation, the latter financed by industry and the NSF, and
materials developed for this course came to be used in more than 500
schools all over the world.
Malmstadt patented a design
for a titration apparatus, which from 1954 was manufactured by Sargent
and sold bearing his name. In late 1963, the Heath Company began
selling the Malmstadt-Enke Instrument Station, which was a package of
modules that provided a variety of analytical tools. The station was
developed by Malmstadt as a teaching device that enabled students to
assemble the various parts of an instrument and thus gain a better
understanding of the basic principles involved. At about the same time,
Heath also began selling a pH meter based on Malmstadt's design. He
wrote more than 150 scientific articles and ten internationally used
textbooks.
He served as president of
the University of Illinois ACS Section, and as faculty advisor for the
Phi Lambda Upsilon chemical honorary fraternity. He was sometimes
referred to as "High Voltage Malmstadt" by his chemistry students and
colleagues at the University of Illinois, where his prolific ideas and
energy were nearly legendary.
Malmstadt was a Guggenheim
Fellow in 1960, and received the ACS Award in Chemical Instrumentation
in 1963, the Donald P. Eckman Education Award of the Instrument Society
of America in 1970, the ACS Award in Analytical Chemistry in 1976, the
ISCO Award for Significant Contributions to Instrumentation for
Chemical Separations in 1980, the ACS J. Calvin Giddings Award in
Education in 1984, the Anachem Award of the Federation of Analytical
Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies in 1987, and the Hasler Award of
the Spectroscopy Society of America in 1995.
Brian R. Strohmeier,
Chairman of the Hasler Award Committee, stated that "Professor
Malmstadt made immense contributions to analytical chemistry,
especially in the areas of atomic and molecular spectroscopy, both as
an educator and a researcher...he is well known for his brilliant
scientific intellect, nurturing personality, high moral standards,
enthusiasm, creativity, and leadership in analytical chemistry. The
world of atomic spectroscopy today is largely a result of the many
generations of students that he has mentored."
Larry Faulkner, former Head
of the Chemistry Department at the University of Illinois and currently
President of the University of Texas, said "Howard Malmstadt was at
least a decade ahead of others in understanding the great qualitative
changes that could occur in analytical chemistry by taking advantage,
first, of the advances in microelectronics and, later, by the new
technology resting on microprocessors. Malmstadt also anticipated the
explosive growth that would occur in clinical analytical chemistry."
Malmstadt retired from the
faculty at the University of Illinois in 1978, and moved to Hawaii in
1981 to co-found the Pacific and Asia Christian University, which was
renamed the University of the Nations in 1989. He served as
International Provost and later as International Chancellor of the
University of the Nations, which currently has about 300 branch
locations in 90 countries.
