Dear Colleagues,<\/p>\n
I am sad to report to you the passing of one of our long time colleagues, Dr. Jack Ohanian. Jack served many roles in the college and university over his 40 year career, including Associate Dean and Interim Dean in the college, as well as Interim Vice President of Research. He was always a passionate and tireless advocate for the university and for the profession of engineering, especially nuclear engineering which was his academic discipline. He was very active nationally, having served as chairman of the American Association of Engineering Societies and former president of the American Nuclear Society. Jack left a lasting legacy to the college through his generous endowment of the Ohanian Lecture Series, which brings outstanding scholars to campus to enrich the intellectual climate for our faculty and students. A memorial service is being planned. I will update you on the location and time of the service once the arrangements have been finalized by the family.<\/p>\n
Cammy Abernathy From The Florida Engineer, Summer 2001<\/em> After nearly 38 years at the University of Florida, interim engineering Dean Jack Ohanian will retire this summer.\u00a0 With his attention to detail and eye for quality, he played a key role in the growth and heightened stature of the engineering college, colleagues say.<\/p>\n The odds didn\u2019t look good when Jack Ohanian set out to convince the federal government to create a multi-million dollar particle research center at UF.<\/p>\n At least 110 other universities also sought a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center, including such heavyweights as the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan.\u00a0 UF had never attracted federal support for a single project on so large a scale, so there was no one to turn to for advice.\u00a0 And Ohanian and colleagues had already made at least three failed bids for engineering research centers.\u00a0 \u201cIt was a long shot because we didn\u2019t have a track record as a university of doing these things,\u201d Ohanian says.\u00a0 But a team composed of Ohanian, Win Phillips, then dean of engineering, and Brij Moudgil, professor of materials science and engineering, kept UF in the running as the field narrowed to 55 universities and then to 10.\u00a0 Ohanian helped craft a presentation that narrowed the number to three, and UF was awarded the center in 1994.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was very actively engaged in the entire process,\u201d says Moudgil, who directs the $5.3 million center in its newly-built 23,000 square-foot building.\u00a0 \u201cA lot of people knew principles, but Jack knew how to put them in practice.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s an oft-repeated assessment of Ohanian, who will retire as interim dean this summer after nearly four decades at the college.\u00a0 As a teacher and researcher in his field, nuclear engineering, and as a top administrator in the engineering college, Ohanian set high goals and worked steadily and efficiently to achieve them, colleagues say.\u00a0 It\u2019s no accident that his rise through the ranks \u2013 first in the nuclear and radiological engineering department and then in the engineering college brass \u2013 closely parallels the growth and increasing stature of the college, they say.<\/p>\n \u201cJack has always strived for excellence,\u201d says Win Phillips, vice president for research and dean of the graduate school.\u00a0 \u201cHe knows what quality is when he sees it \u2013 and he has always been able to make decisions on the basis of quality and the future of the College of Engineering.\u201d<\/p>\n With $10, Starting a Life in a New Country<\/p>\n Few would have guessed Ohanian\u2019s future lay in Florida when he came to America from his native Turkey at age 23.\u00a0 His father was a successful furrier but felt his son would have a better life outside Turkey, where the family\u2019s Armenian heritage made them targets of discrimination.\u00a0 Ohanian, who had a bachelor\u2019s degree from Robert College in Istanbul, arrived in New York in 1956 with 100 Turkish lire \u2013 about $10 \u2013 and the promise of acceptance to graduate school and an assistantship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy.<\/p>\n In his first year at Rensselaer, Ohanian lived with the family of a management professor, which helped him improve his conversational English.\u00a0 \u201cMy main problem was with American slang, but I picked it up fairly quickly from the family\u2019s five teenagers,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Ohanian majored in electrical engineering, but focused on nuclear engineering as a result of spending two summers as a research assistant at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York.\u00a0 It was a period of great excitement and optimism about nuclear energy.\u00a0 At Brookhaven, researchers were probing many novel nuclear reactor concepts, an atmosphere of scientific openness reflected in Ohanian\u2019s master\u2019s thesis on circulating liquid fuel reactors.\u00a0 The idea never reached the experimental stage, but \u201cback then, a lot of new ideas were being fried, some just on paper but some actually built,\u201d Ohanian says.<\/p>\n Ohanian earned his master\u2019s degree in electrical engineering in 1960, following it up three years later with his doctorate in nuclear engineering and science.\u00a0 His doctoral adviser told him UF had recently launched a nuclear engineering program.\u00a0 In a period when the first commercial reactors were just coming on line, nuclear engineering departments were a rarity among U.S. universities, and Ohanian promptly applied.<\/p>\n UF was a much smaller place.\u00a0 Fall 1963 enrollment totaled just 14, 810 students, about a quarter of the 46,107 students enrolled currently.\u00a0 Engineering college enrollment was just 1,244 students, a fraction of the current total of 6,243 students. \u00a0 The \u201cnew engineering complex\u201d \u2013 the now weathered aerospace, electrical and chemical engineering buildings \u2013 had yet to be built.\u00a0 The graduate school was so small that Ohanian, like all other prospective professors at the time, interviewed with the late Linton Grinter, namesake for Grinter hall and the head of graduate studies.<\/p>\n Ohanian and his wife, Sandy, moved into their new home in Gainesville on Nov. 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was shot.\u00a0 At UF \u2013 where J. Wayne Reitz was president \u2013 Ohanian joined just eight professors in a department that enrolled 40-50 graduate students and had no undergraduate program.<\/p>\n \u2018Very Methodical and Rational\u2019<\/p>\n In his early years at UF, Ohanian focused on research and teaching.\u00a0 Among his most prominent activities was his role in research at a close-to-critical experimental facility formerly on campus.\u00a0 Ohanian jokes that regulators probably wouldn\u2019t allow the facility to be built today, but he says it achieved interesting and important results that allowed the Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor to the U.S. Department of Energy) to better understand the dynamic behavior of nuclear reactor cores.<\/p>\n Ohanian mentored several students during the 1960s, but perhaps his best-known prot\u00e9g\u00e9 is Nils Diaz, who went on to become a longtime UF faculty member and is now a commissioner on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.\u00a0 Ohanian chaired Diaz\u2019 doctoral committee, and the two worked together in a tiny office for years.\u00a0 Diaz, who started UF\u2019s Innovative Nuclear Space Power & Propulsion Institute, says Ohanian taught him skills that have proved essential to his career.<\/p>\n \u201cJack is one of the most exacting, performance-driven academicians and executives I have known,\u201d Diaz said.\u00a0 \u201cHe taught me how to write, precisely and to the point, a skill I nourished and used constantly.\u00a0 He has been a remarkable and dependable asset to the University of Florida, the state and nation.\u201d<\/p>\n As Ohanian continued to work, his natural administrative talents became evident to nuclear engineering department Chairman Robert Uhrig.\u00a0 Uhrig, who went on to serve as dean of engineering between 1968 and 1973, appointed Ohanian chairman of the nuclear engineering department in 1969 \u2013 a year before he became full professor.<\/p>\n \u201cJack is extremely well organized and does things in a very methodical and rational way, with what I call the engineering mentality,\u201d says Uhrig, a Gainesville resident who is also a Distinguished Scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee.<\/p>\n As chairman, Ohanian focused on improving and growing the department, increasing its size to 150 upper division undergraduates and 65-70 graduate students by the mid 1970s.\u00a0 He also broadened its scope, taking over the medical physics academic program from the College of Medicine.\u00a0 Coupled with the department\u2019s expansion into health physics and related areas, the move eventually earned the department its current moniker as the Nuclear and Radiological Engineering department.\u00a0 Ohanian went on sabbatical at the Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge Associated Universities between 1976 and 1978.\u00a0 There, he worked closely with nuclear pioneer Alvin Weinberg on a blueprint for an acceptable nuclear enterprise for the United States.\u00a0 At that time, it was projected that there would be as many as 1,000 nuclear plants by the turn of the century, and the blueprint was considered a landmark study.<\/p>\n Shortly after Ohanian\u2019s return to UF in 1979, he earned his first appointment in the engineering college as associate dean for research.<\/p>\n That year proved a turning point for the nuclear industry.<\/p>\n \u201cThe China Syndrome,\u201d a movie about a fictional nuclear meltdown, had just finished a first-run in theaters when the nation\u2019s most serious nuclear accident occurred at Three Mile Island.\u00a0 Although nuclear energy was already facing problems due to its unexpectedly high cost, the accident cast a pall over the industry that continued for many years.\u00a0 Plants under construction were completed, but no new ones had been ordered since 1978.\u00a0 (The current total of 103 plants generates about 21 percent of the nation\u2019s electricity).\u00a0 Nuclear engineering departments everywhere, including at UF, lost students and downsized or revamped their offerings.\u00a0 Contrasting the heady years of the mid 1970s, the UF nuclear engineering department currently has about 44 graduate students and 20 upper division undergraduate students.<\/p>\n Ohanian is a strong advocate for nuclear power, penning editorials espousing his views that have appeared in The Gainesville Sun, the Miami Herald and other papers around the state.\u00a0 He admits it hasn\u2019t been easy to view the downturn in the industry, but he\u2019s optimistic about its future.\u00a0 The nationwide shortage of electricity, coupled with technical advancements that have made nuclear plants safe and much more efficient, make nuclear increasingly attractive, he says.\u00a0 Because nuclear plants to not produce any carbon dioxide, they also appear to offer the best hope of reducing greenhouse gases while continuing to produce the megawatts of electricity that society demands, he says.\u00a0 Also, the current workforce is rapidly reaching retirement age, meaning there will be plenty of opportunities for young people in coming years.<\/p>\n \u201cUltimately, we will see the second era for nuclear energy,\u201d Ohanian says.\u00a0 \u201cBut it\u2019s going to take another five to seven years before we get to the point where utilities will start building plants again.\u201d<\/p>\n Hi Proudest Achievements<\/p>\n After ten years as associate dean of research, Ohanian became associate dean for administration and planning in 1989 and, two years later, associate dean for research and administration \u2013 the number two spot at the college.\u00a0 He served as interim vice president for research and dean of the graduate school between 1998 and 1999 before being named to his current position as interim dean of engineering in July 1999.<\/p>\n Ohanian says his proudest achievements include snaring the ERC and helping to encourage and foster more interdisciplinary programs and cooperative ventures, such as the biomedical engineering graduate program.\u00a0 A fellow of the American Nuclear Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is also proud of his numerous achievements in the profession, including serving as president of the American Nuclear Society in 1990-91 and chairman of the board of the American Association of Engineering Societies in 1994.<\/p>\n Looking back, he says, He\u2019s glad his career slanted more heavily toward leadership than research roles.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve n ever been the typical academic,\u201d he says.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m more of a practical guy.\u00a0 I\u2019m a doer.\u00a0 I like to get things done, and I have been there and done that.\u201d<\/p>\n While his retirement officially begins July 1, Ohanian expects to devote some time, on a part-time basis, to helping Pramod Khargonekar, incoming dean of engineering, adjust to his new position.\u00a0 But ultimately, he\u2019ll have to relax his work ethic.\u00a0 He says he is looking forward to the change.\u00a0 He and Sandy plan to move permanently to their lake home near Keystone Heights.\u00a0 They expect to spend more time enjoying their favorite recreation \u2013 vacations to distant corners of the world, often aboard small cruise ships.\u00a0 Ohanian also wants to take up woodworking.\u00a0 The couple will certainly enjoy more visits with their daughters, Heather Allen and Holly Welty, husbands Scott and Richard, and the Allen\u2019s children, one-year-old Benjamin and four-year-old Samuel.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter putting in all these years,\u201d Ohanian says, casting a smile at the photos of his grandchildren on his desk.\u00a0 \u201cI think I deserve to relax a little and pursue other interests.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Colleagues, I am sad to report to you the passing of one of our long time colleagues, Dr. Jack Ohanian. 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\nDean of the College of Engineering<\/em><\/p>\nA Job Well Done<\/h2>\n
\nBy Aaron Hoover<\/p>\n