Frederick F. Lange, 1939-2010
One of ACerS distinguished members, Fred Lange, suddenly died on April 2, 2010. According to an announcement posted on the website of the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he was with his wife and family attending the doctoral dissertation defense of his daughter, Helena, at the University of Arizona.
Lange had been a professor in materials science and chemical engineering at UCSB since the mid-1980s. Over the years, he published more than 300 journal articles, particularly on topics such as power processing, fracture mechanics and damage-tolerant ceramic–metal composites. His most recent work focused on solution processing routes to single crystal films, colloidal routes to the powder processing, and the processing and properties composites. He held at least 32 patents.
ACerS elevated Lange to Distinguished Life Member status in 2002 and he won the W. David Kingery award in 2009. In fact, Lange had won nearly every major award in the Society, including the Outstanding Educator Award, the John Jeppson Award, the Sosman Memorial Lecture Award, the Richard M. Fulrath Award and the Ross Coffin Purdy Award American Ceramic Society, Best Paper. In 1974, he was tapped to be an ACerS Fellow.
Besides teaching at UCSB he had a distinguished visiting professor appointment at the National University of Singapore. He received his BS in Ceramic Science at Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. in solid-state technology at Penn State University. Early in his career he was a temporary senior scientist at AERE Harwell, joined Westinghouse R&D to become a fellow scientist, then on to Rockwell International Science Center as a group leader and later a principal scientist. He was a Jubilee Professor at Chalmers University (1983), a Miegunyah Distinguished Fellow at the University of Melbourne (2007) and a Rutgers Distinguished Engineering (2007).
Lange was identified as ISI Highly Cited Researcher in 2002. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1992. He was a Humboldt Senior Fellow in 1993 and, in 1997, won the Max Planck Research Award. Recently he was awarded the Richard Brook Prize by the European Ceramic Society (2009). In 1980, he was awarded Rockwell Engineer of the Year for recognizing the failure mode for a Space Shuttle Tile problem that arose 8 month prior to the first mission.