Eli Ruckenstein
State University of New York at Buffalo

Eli Ruckenstein’s office at the State University of New York at Buffalo is lined with his numerous awards, including the 2004 Founders Award from the National Academy of Engineering and the 1998 National Medal of Science, which is bestowed on individuals who have made outstanding contributions to knowledge in the chemical, physical, biological, mathematical, engineering, or social sciences.  Ruckenstein holds the title of Distinguished Professor, and at almost 81 years of age he still energetically and passionately pursues his research, developing new interests and contributing to cutting-edge research.

Ruckenstein was born in a small agricultural town in northern Romania.  He suffered great hardships in his formative years; however, his insatiable curiosity and his intellectual passion led him to persist in his studies, and to pursue knowledge wherever he could find it. 

Over many years, Ruckenstein’s prolific and imaginative research has advanced theories in transport phenomena, interfacial phenomena, catalysis, colloidal forces, polymers, surfactants, materials, and countless other diverse areas of chemical engineering and science.  His inspirational story is one of great difficulties but also of great satisfaction.  In fact, Ruckenstein believes that joy and pain are mixed not only in life but also in scientific research, because you cannot come to the joy of rewarding new research without the painful process of discovering new questions and developing ideas in order to solve them.

Biography | Career Achievements | Outlook 
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Biography
Eli Ruckenstein was born in Botosani, a small agricultural town in northern Romania.  His family was well off until they lost everything in the Great Depression.  Thus, during his formative years, he endured great struggle to fight poverty.  He began school at seven but at fourteen he was expelled due to racial laws.  The Jewish community responded by organizing a private high school where the teachers were intellectuals who loved their jobs and, although without the necessary credentials, made schooling interesting and exciting.  In his last two years of high school, he was taken into forced labor six days a week from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m.  His task was to carry bricks on a scaffold all day.  Although he was out of school, he still studied by himself and took exams at the end of each of these two years.  He soon fell in love with mathematics, which he learned by himself, and ultimately laid the educational foundation for the rest of his future studies.

In 1944, the year when the Russian troops entered Romania and the fascist government was replaced by a communist regime, Ruckenstein arrived in Bucharest in order to enter the University.  He imagined this institution as a temple of learning, but when he reached the Polytechnic Institute, which was the School of Engineering, he was disappointed to find military types of buildings.  He was also disoriented in choosing a profession.  His interests were in mathematics, chemistry, and physics.  A family friend guided him towards chemical engineering as a way of bringing together all of these fields into one discipline.  In order to enter the Polytechnic Institute he had to take competitive exams, since there were 400 candidates vying for just 20 seats.  Fortunately, Ruckenstein was among the successful ones, and received his degree in 1949.

Although the education was free in Romania, even at the University level, Ruckenstein suffered hunger throughout his student years, and many times, didn’t have money for a street car ticket, resulting in having to walk long distances.  However, hardships such as this did not diminish his perseverance to learn.  Ruckenstein had a thirst for knowledge and spent his time in the library reading every journal in his chosen field.  When he took his final exams in Chemical Engineering, he met Professor Emil Bratu, who became his mentor and of whom he keeps fond memories.  In 1948 Ruckenstein married Velina Rothstein, an event which he describes as the best thing he has ever done.  He credits his wife with having a tremendous influence on his career by offering unflinching support for his academic goals.  By profession a chemist, she worked in a research institute and often earned more money than he did as an academic.

In 1949, Ruckenstein secured a position of Assistant Professor at the Polytechnic Institute in the Department of Chemical Engineering.  At the time, this was quite a miraculous occurrence considering he was not a member of the Communist Party. However, because he was not part of the ruling party either, it still took him 15 years to be promoted to associate professor.

Before 1958, Romanian scientists were not allowed to send papers to the West for publication.  When this rule was overturned, Ruckenstein’s work reached an international audience, and his success in the field began to take off.  In 1969, he was invited to spend six weeks in London at the University College and Imperial College.  When he returned home, there were letters from the University of Minnesota and Clarkson University inviting him to the United States.  The University of Minnesota wanted him to make arrangements through the Romanian Academy of Science.  However, this suggestion was not viable at the time, due to the rigid policies of the Romania government which controlled all institutions, including the Academy, and which discriminated against persons who were not members of the Communist Party.

Clarkson University had received a grant from the National Science Foundation for a visiting European scientist.  This allowed Ruckenstein to bypass the Romanian Academy and, in turn, spend one academic year at Clarkson.  Subsequently, in 1970, he received a permanent position as Full Professor with tenure at the University of Delaware.  It was not easy for Ruckenstein to acclimate to new ways and a new atmosphere, but his American colleagues were very friendly and helpful throughout this transitional time.  In addition to having to get accustomed to new ways of living, he had to deal with an extremely difficult family problem.  While his wife was allowed to accompany him to the United States, his two children were not allowed to leave Romania, a restriction in place to compel him to come back.  It took two, long years of effort to get his children out of Romania, and through this process, his colleagues at the University of Delaware, particularly Art Metzner, were of the greatest help.  Ruckenstein's son, Andrei, is now a professor of physics at Rutgers University and his daughter, Lelia, is a literary critic and a writer.

In 1971 Professor William Gill, Ruckenstein’s former chair at Clarkson, moved to the University of Buffalo as Dean of the Engineering School.  He encouraged Ruckenstein to move to Buffalo as well, and from 1973 to the present, Ruckenstein has been a faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering (now Chemical and Biological Engineering), SUNY at Buffalo.

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Career Achievements
Ruckenstein conducts both theoretical and experimental research that has not only increased scientists’ understanding of the fundamental phenomena of chemical processes, but has led to the development of enhanced research methods and new materials.

His initial interests were in transport phenomena, and two of his more significant contributions have been "a generalized penetration theory” and “scaling and physical models in transport phenomena.”  In the first, he developed a new similarity transformation on the basis of which numerous unsolved transport equations could be solved, such as mass transfer in wave motion and mass transfer under pulsating flows.  In the second, he showed how numerous complex problems could be solved by coupling simple solutions valid in extreme cases.  An example is the “heat transfer under combined forced and free convection.”  He also suggested a physical model for turbulence near a wall, which he applied to a solid surface and to boiling heat transfer; he developed a theory of thixotropy, theories for foams, a unitary theory of phoretic motions, theories for electrokinetic phenomena involving osmosis and anomalous osmosis, and he extended the simple approach of Prandtl for Newtonian fluids to viscoelastic fluids.

After arriving in the U.S., his research diversified widely, encompassing the areas of catalysis, colloids, phase transformations, thermodynamics, and materials.  In catalysis Ruckenstein pioneered the areas of stability of supported metal catalysts and catalytic combustion, and he suggested solid solution catalysts for CO2 reforming of CH4.  Further, he developed a theory for the mechanism of oxidation by mixed oxides, proposed a kinetics for the selectivity of the catalytic processes, and was the first to use quantum mechanics in the interpretation of catalytic reactions.

In the area of colloids and interfaces, Ruckenstein has introduced the concept of interaction force boundary layer in the examination of the deposition of particles on surfaces, performed simulations to understand the collective behavior of a large number of charged colloidal particles, and developed a theory for hydration forces, as well as theories for specific ion effects, steric repulsion, and bridging forces.  He has shown that hydration and double layer forces should be coupled in a unitary treatment and changed the traditional treatment of double layers.  He developed a thermodynamics of surfactant aggregation and a new kind of thermodynamics for microemulsions, lamellar liquid crystals, and phospholipids monolayers.  He was concerned with the phospholipid bilayer and examined the interactions between them.  He developed theories for wetting and for the stability of both Newtonian and non-Newtonian thin films.

In the area of molecular thermodynamics, he developed theories for the solubility of gases and pharmaceutics in binary and multi-component solvents and for the solubility of proteins.  He also developed theories for salting in and out, and for the local composition in liquid mixtures.

In the area of kinetics of phase transformation, Ruckenstein developed theories for nucleation for unary and binary mixtures, free of macroscopic thermodynamic concepts, based on a first passage time.  He also developed unitary theories for nucleation and growth. In the areas of polymers and materials, he suggested and implemented numerous technological approaches to prepare composites, conductive polymers, membranes for separation processes, polymers with unusual properties, pastes with high thermal conductivity, and more recently, materials for H2 storage.

In addition to the 2004 National Academy of Engineering Founders Award and the 1998 National Medal of Science, Ruckenstein has been honored by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers with its most prestigious awards: the Founders Award in 2002 for outstanding contributions to the field of chemical engineering; the Alpha Chi Sigma Award in 1977 for excellence in chemical engineering research; and the Walker Award for excellence in contributions to chemical engineering literature in 1988.

He received the 1986 Kendall Award of the American Chemical Society for creative theories and experiments in colloid and surface science and, in 1994, the society’s Langmuir Lecture Award.  In 1996, he was awarded the American Chemical Society’s E.V. Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry.  He received the Senior Humboldt Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in West Germany in 1985 for his work related to detergents, and the Creativity Award from the National Science Foundation for his work on protein separation.  The Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute honored him in 2003 with inclusion in their Pioneers of Science Award.  In 1990, Ruckenstein became a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Ruckenstein is a voracious reader and a true intellectual.  He converses easily on world history, politics, and the history of science and engineering.  He has deep knowledge of the course which scientific progress has taken, and he is well versed in the lives of, and the specific contributions made by, many of the great minds that have preceded us.  He has a bibliographic memory, and is often able to cite his own and others’ contributions made to a specific area as long as fifty years ago, specifying both the year and the journal of publication!

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Outlook
Now, at nearly 81 years of age, Ruckenstein still works full time, is active in his contributions, and finds his work in the department to be extremely satisfying.  One source of satisfaction is his interaction with his younger colleagues, whom Ruckenstein finds to be very talented and dedicated to their work.  Ruckenstein feels it is very important to have flexibility in one's own work, and is now expanding his own research in a variety of new areas.  He has recently acquired interest in areas related to proteins and the thermodynamics of complex systems.  Even though he has made his mark with more than 800 publications, he has no intention of slowing down.

When asked about his concerns and hope for the future of chemical engineering, Ruckenstein sees great promise.  As the world changes, so too must engineering research.  In the past, the goal of chemical engineering was to design equipment, but now he sees the mission as designing technology.  There is a tremendous need for chemistry, biochemistry, and physics to answer modern questions in a variety of fields such as pharmaceutics, medicine, chemicals for industry or agriculture, and to provide solutions to problems that we may not even be familiar with yet.  In this way, Ruckenstein believes the field will be able to provide enough flexibility to withstand the changes in industry and in the public sector, and will offer opportunities to improve the quality of life for everyone.

Looking back at his long career and life, he is grateful for the opportunities, as well as for the hardships, which he has encountered, and considers himself to be a very lucky man.  As he comes into his office every morning, he is still excited by the challenge of a new problem to address, by a new theory to explore, and by the anticipation of the joy of quest.