SEMINARS & EVENTS · SU LECTURESHIP

SU LECTURESHIP

With the establishment of the Su Conference Room and the Su Distinguished Lecture Series, the University of Rochester joins the Su family in honoring Professor Su's long and distinguished career in Chemical Engineering and the spirit with which he pursued it.

The 8th Distinguished Su Lectureship
University of Rochester, Department of Chemical Engineering

Dr. Tobin Marks
Departments of Chemistry & the Materials Research Center
Northwestern University

May 20, 2009
Goergen Hall, Room 101

Reception: 1:45 - 2:15 pm
Lecture: 2:15 - 3:15 pm

In honor of Professor Gouq-Jen Su(1908-1996). Professor Su lived a long and productive life, dedicated to the pursuit of ideas and ideals. He was born in 1908 in Fukien, a coastal province in the southern region of China . He attended a Northern Baptist missionary school as a teenager. In 1931, at the age of 23, Professor Su graduated from Tsing Hua University in Peking. In 1934, Gouq-Jen Su was one of the several college graduates selected, through a nation-wide examination, to further his studies at the graduate level, in the United States . That summer, he journeyed to MIT to continue his studies and, in three years, received his D.Sc. degree. During World War II, Dr. Su served for four years as chairman of the Chemical Engineering Department at Tsing Hua University . He helped design and operate an alcohol fermentation plant and a sugar refinery in Kunming . The alcohol produced was mixed with gasoline and was utilized as liquid fuel for U.S. Army motor vehicles traveling on the Burma Road, some forty years ahead of gasohol. Professor Su joined our faculty at the University of Rochester in 1947 and retired in 1974, though continuing as Emeritus for the remainder of his life. Over his active fifty-year career, Professor Su supervised 33 master's students and 15 doctoral students. Among his numerous publications, his outstanding papers on applied thermodynamics have been widely cited and are considered landmarks in the field. He proposed a modified form of the van der Waals Law of Corresponding States. Every thermodynamics textbook, to this day, contains his generalized equations of state for real gases.