ht. J. Heor Mass Transfer.
Pergamon Press plc.Printed

Vol. 34, No. 7, pp. i-ii, 1991
in Great Britain

Professor Raymond

Viskanta

on his 60th birthday

PROFESSOR Raymond
Viskanta celebrates his 60thbirthday this month, and it is with great pleasure that
his colleagues acknowledge his many contributions
tothe field of heat transfer.
Raymond Viskanta was born on 16 July 1931 inMarijampole,
Lithuania.
As the front lines of theSoviet-German
conflict
approached
his family’s
home, his parents left Lithuania in the summer of1944 and, after almost six months of intermittent
travel across Germany,
settled near the city ofNienburg. Shortly after World War II, his family was
moved to displaced persons camps located first in
Uchte and later in Diepholz, West Germany. Thefamily immigrated
to the United States in October
1949, when a farmer near Stockbridge,
Michigan,guaranteed employment to his father and family housing for one year.
In February 1950, Raymond Viskanta left the farmand moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he foundemployment
in a factory and attended Englewood
Evening High School. After receiving his high school
diploma in 1951, he attended
the Wilson JuniorCollege, taking courses at night and working during
the day. In 1953 he enrolled as a full time student at
the University of Illinois-Navy
Pier in Chicago, andafter one year transferred to the main campus of theuniversity. He received his B.S.M.E. degree with highhonors from the University of Illinois in June 1955

and started his graduate work at Purdue Universitythat autumn. He majored in heat transfer and wasawarded the M.S.M.E. degree in August 1956.
After graduating from Purdue, he accepted employment at Argonne National Laboratory as an assistantmechanical engineer. During the next two years heconducted research related to boiling, two-phase flow,
and nuclear reactor safety, while taking graduate levelcourses in the evening at Illinois Institute of Technology. After receiving a U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Fellowship, he returned to Purdue University
to work on his Ph.D. degree. He completed his doctoral research in absentia at Argonne and received thePh.D. degree from Purdue in August 1960. From 1960
to 1962 he was associate mechanicalengineer atArgonne National Laboratory.
In 1962 Dr Viskanta joined the Purdue University
faculty as an Associate
Professorof MechanicalEngineering and was promoted to Professor of Mechanical Engineeringin 1966. During the 1968-1969
academic year he was the Visiting Springer Professorof Mechanical Engineering at the University of California-Berkeley.
He has also been a Guest Professor
at the Technical University of Munich (1976), a Visiting Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology(1983) and a Guest Professor at the University ofKarlsruhe (summers of 1987 and 1988). In 1986 he
was named to his present position as the W. F. M.

ii

F. P. INCRO~ERAel ul.

Goss Distinguished
Professorof EngineeringatPurdue University.
During the past 30 years, Professor
Viskanta’s
research has encompassed
a wide range of topics inconvection and radiation heat transfer, and he hasdone much to maintain Purdue’s position as a leader
in the field. A distinguishingfeature of his researchhas been its impact on both the science and practiceof heat transfer. This duality is manifested in many
areas, but perhaps none more so than in the field ofradiation transfer. Beginning in the 1960s with seminal contributions
to the understanding
and analysisof radiation transfer in participating
media, he hasconsistently contributed
to extending the frontiers of
this discipline and to delineatinginteractions
withother modes of heat transfer. In addition he haspioneered applications
to such diverse fields as air
and water pollution, remote sensing, glass melting,combustion, and solar energy collection. The intensityof his involvementwith radiation transfer has beennearly matched by his work on natural convection
and solid/liquid phase change. In natural convection,
he has considered virtually every facet of the subject
including instabilities,
internal and external flows,
double-diffusive
effects, and interactions
with otherheat transfer modes. Since its inception as a viableenergy storage technology,
Professor Viskanta has
made many important
contributions
to the understanding of solid/liquid phase change behavior andhas more recently expanded his efforts to include solidification in metallic systems. In the course of his
research he has mentored approximately
50 doctoral
and 40 master’s students and has published more than
300 refereed papers.
Professor Viskanta has contributed
extensively tothe disseminationof technical information.
He hasserved as a member of the National Heat TransferConference Coordinating Committee of ASME’s Heat
Transfer Division and the Thermophysics
TechnicalCommittee of AIAA. He was also associate technicaleditor (198ll1987)
of the ASME Journal qf HeutTransfer and currently serves as its technical editor.
He has been an editor of Experimental Heut Transfer

and is a member of the honorary advisory boards 01
International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer
and International Communications in Heat and Muss
Tramfer. He is also a member of the editorial advisoryboards of the AIAA Journal of’ Thermophysics undHeat Tran?fer and the Annual Review qf‘ Numericul
Fluid Mechanics und Heat Trunqfkr. In addition, he isa member of the Scientific Council of the International
Centre for Heat and Mass Transfer,
Belgrade,
Yugoslavia.
Professor Viskanta has been widely recognized forhis professional
accomplishments.
In particular,
hehas received the ASME Heat Transfer Memorial
Award (1976), the AIAA Thermophysics
Award(1979), the ASEE Senior Research Award (1984)
PurdueUniversity’sSigma Xi ResearchAward(1985), the ASME/AIChE
Max Jakob Memorial
Award (1986) an ASME Heat Transfer Best Paper
Award (1986), the ASME Melville Medal (1988) andthe first Nusselt-Reynolds
prize (1991). He is a fellowof ASME (1976) and AIAA (1988). In 1987 he waselected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In addition he has received the U.S. Senior
Scientist Award from the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation(1975) and a Fellowship from the Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science (1983).
To Professor Viskanta’s colleagues outside Purdue,
he is known as an innovative, dedicated and tirelessscholar. These perceptions are shared by his students
and colleagues at Purdue, who, on a daily basis, alsofind him to be a kind, thoughtful and caring humanbeing. His students, colleagues and friends throughout the world join with the editors of this journal towish him many more years of happiness, good healthand professional achievement.
F. P. INCROPERA
J. P. HARTNETTY. KUROSAKIW. J. MINKOWY~Z
C.-L. TIEN
E. R. F. WINTER
S. WITTIG