Morton Denn

Denn was born on July 7, 1939, in Paterson, New Jersey[1][2][10] to Herbert, a drugstore owner, and Esther Denn. He has one sister, Dorothy.[11][12] During his childhood, Denn was an active member of the Junior Congregation of Temple Emanuel of North Jersey in Paterson[13][14] was part of his synagogue's Boy Scout troop,[15] and in 1957 served as the North Jersey Regional President of the Aleph Zadik Aleph youth organization.[16] He graduated from Eastside High School, where he was inducted into the National Honor Society,[17][18] in 1957.[19] He worked as a laboratory technician for the Linen Thread Company developing foamed plastic boat bumpers the summer before college.[2]

While at Princeton University, he was president of Hillel and a member of the Dial Lodge, Triangle Club, and band.[11][18] He wrote a senior thesis under William R. Schowalter on normal stress measurements and worked at the Dupont Engineering Research Laboratory[9][2] during the summers of 1960 and 1961. He graduated magna cum laude with a BScE in chemical engineering in 1961. He pursued his PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota between 1961 and 1964 and wrote his dissertation, "The Optimization by Complex Processes," under the supervision of Rutherford Aris.[1][2][9][11] After finishing his degree, he spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Delaware's Chemical Engineering department, studying Non-Newtonian fluid mechanics with Arthur B. Metzner.[10][2][1]

Denn joined the faculty at the University of Delaware in 1965 as an assistant professor of Computer Science; only a quarter of his academic appointment at this time was in Chemical Engineering. He became an associate professor of Chemical Engineering in 1968, a full professor in 1971, and the Allan P. Colburn Professor in 1977.[1][2][9] He moved to the University of California, Berkeley,[10] as Professor of Chemical Engineering in 1981 and served as the department chair from 1991 to 1994. He simultaneously held an appointment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he was the program leader and founder of the Polymers and Composites Research Program in the Center for Advanced Materials from 1983 to 1999. He also headed the Materials Chemistry group in the Materials Science Division from 1995 to 1998.[1][9][2]

Denn joined the faculty of City College of New York[3] in 1999 as CUNY Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering. He also held an appointment in the physics department. In 2001, he became the Albert Einstein Professor of Science and Engineering[1][9] and was appointed the third director of the Benjamin Levich Institute for Physicochemical Hydrodynamics, a role he held until 2015. He retired in 2014.[20][1][9] Students who worked in his lab include Benny D. Freeman, Rakesh Jain, and Glenn Lipscomb.[1][2]

During his career, Denn was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1978-1985); Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (1979-1980); California Institute of Technology (1980); University of Melbourne (1985); Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1998-1999, 2009–2010); Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (2011, 2014); and University of Amsterdam (2012-2015).[1][3][10] He worked as the sole editor[2] of AIChE Journal between 1985 and 1991 and as the editor for the Journal of Rheology from 1995 to 2005.[9][2][1] He also worked on the editorial boards for the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics (1976-2019), Advances in Chemical Engineering (1984–85, 1993–2003), and Rheologica Acta (1995-2005) and as a consulting editor for AIChE Journal from 1991 to 1995.

He married Marilyn Goldfarb in Teaneck, New Jersey on June 28, 1962[11] and had three children: Matt,[21] Susannah, and Rebekah. By 1996, he had married historian Vivienne Roumani.[2]

• Morton Denn publications indexed by Google Scholar
• Publications by Morton Denn at ResearchGate