Mailand R. Strunk
Missouri University of Science & Technology

Mailand R. Strunk was a member of the faculty of the Chemical Engineering Department of the University of Missouri-Rolla (now Missouri University of Science & Technology) for 22 years, beginning in 1957.  Those were the golden years of chemical engineering when new and powerful ways of simulating and scaling up processes were just being developed through the use of new concepts of transport phenomena and the application of the computer to accomplish the computations necessary.  During the time that he was part of the chemical engineering faculty, the department grew from only 8 faculty and 266 students to 21 faculty and 454 students.  During that time his department was one of the largest chemical engineering departments in the United States.  What is interesting is how Mailand came to be part of this faculty and eventually its chair for 15 years, from 1964 until he retired in 1979.

Mailand came from Kansas City and almost ended up a Kansan.  He earned his bachelor degree in chemical engineering at Kansas State University in 1941.  After he graduated he worked for National Lead Company in St. Louis and then the Charleston Navy Yard in South Carolina until September of 1942.  At that time he heeded the call of Walter T. Doc Schrenk, chair of the Chemical Engineering and Chemistry Department of the Missouri School of Mines (MSM, the original name of the University of Missouri-Rolla, UMR), to start on a masters degree in chemical engineering.  This was, of course, war time, so he didn't escape the U. S. Army long.  He lacked two weeks of finishing the first semester at MSM when he was called by the Army Air Force, which put him to work as a meteorologist and communications officer.  He did this until his discharge in 1946, having spent some time in post-war Japan.  He finally finished the masters degree in 1947.

Mailand went to work for Shell Oil Company at their Wood River Complex in Illinois near St. Louis where he worked as a technologist in process design.  He met his future wife, Mildred Brueggeman of Alton, IL., while working there.  They were married in 1949.  Strunk didn't escape the military long.  He was called back at the start of the Korean conflict and became the R&D officer in a jet engine laboratory for two years at Wright-Patterson AFB.  After his second discharge in 1952, he returned to the Wood River Plant where he worked for two more years until he decided to pursue a doctorate.

He left his job with Shell and attended Washington University in St. Louis with support from the GI Bill.  Young children had begun to come along by that time, so the finances were tough.  He received his D. Sc. in chemical engineering in 1957.  He still had good connections with Doc Schrenk at MSM, so he secured a faculty position as an assistant professor in chemical engineering in the combined chemical engineering and chemistry department.  Mailand worked his way up the ranks until 1964 when the campus became the University of Missouri-Rolla when the four-campus system was formed.  By that time Dudley Thompson, who had come from Virginia Institute of Technology, was chair of the combined department.  Thompson moved up to become Dean of Faculties (similar to provost), and Strunk was promoted to chair of the newly separated Department of Chemical Engineering in the newly formed School of Engineering.  A separate Department of Chemistry was formed in a new College of Science.

During his tenure as chair of the department, Mailand presided over the construction of a new building for chemical engineering and chemistry and the growth of research activities that became the model for the rest of the campus.  He hired several new faculty members who contributed to the growth of the research activities and also brought new vitality to the teaching by bringing in new concepts that were being developed rapidly at that time in chemical engineering.  Mailand himself embraced the new developments in transport phenomena and its applications and made that area his area of research. (Transport Phenomena by Bird, Stewart and Lightfoot was published in 1960.)  He supervised approximately 10 doctoral candidates and 12 masters candidates in that research field.  During his time as a faculty member and as chair he published about 20 papers with his students.

Possibly Mailand Strunks greatest contribution as a chair of chemical engineering was his ability to develop faculty members to their full potential.  Among the faculty who he brought to the campus, five became department chairs at universities in Arkansas, Arizona, Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri, and one helped organize a new engineering school in Texas.  He was known for his selfless promotion of the faculty members under his charge.  Not least among his contributions was building a strong department that enabled countless students to earn highly regarded degrees in chemical engineering.  Under Strunk a chemical engineering graduate from MSM-UMR became one of the most sought-after by industry in the United States.

Mailand also had some interesting ways of dealing with the ever present pressures of a university administration.  For instance, he always had a high stack of memos on the corner of his desk which were requests for his attention by various administrators. He would deal with them according to a priority system all his own.  When the third memo came in on the same subject, he would consider taking action.  Until then all were regarded as not important enough to worry about.  At the end of the year he would accidentally cause the whole pile to slide into the waste basket which was conveniently positioned just below that corner of the desk.

Mailand didn't get to travel much as a department chair for two reasons.  The first was that shortly after becoming a faculty member, he moved his mother and an invalid brother into a neighboring house in Rolla where he could help care for them.  His responsibility there precluded his traveling much to deliver papers at meetings, so he made sure his faculty had funds for their own travel to promote the research in the department.  Second, he really preferred that others do the traveling. He was truly selfless in taking care of his family and the people with whom he worked.