Longtime professor retires

Gordon Beavers, a distinguished faculty member, retired at the end of the 2005-2006 academic year.

Gordon Beavers was born and grew up in northern England. After receiving a BA degree in engineering from Cambridge University he attended Harvard University as a Gordon McKay Fellow, obtaining an M.S. degree in applied mathematics. He returned to Cambridge to do research on axial flow compressors, earning a Ph.D. in 1963. Immediately afterwards he was appointed as an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Aeronautics and Engineering Mechanics (which was renamed Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics a few years later).
Gordon has spent his whole academic career at the University of Minnesota. He was promoted to full professor in 1974 and appointed as an Institute of Technology Distinguished Professor in 1999. He was a visiting professor at Cambridge University in the spring quarter 1979, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Nihon University in January 1995.
When starting as a faculty member Gordon expanded his research interests from gas turbine engines to general experimental fluid mechanics, and throughout his career his research has covered a broad spectrum of fluid mechanics from high speed compressible flows to slow viscous flows
In the early 1970’s Gordon and Dan Joseph established a new laboratory for research on the fluid mechanics of viscoelastic liquids which generated many novel and interesting results. In the final decade of his career Gordon’s interests in high speed flows and viscoelastic liquids were brought together in a program to study the aerodynamic breakup of viscoelastic liquids under high Mach number conditions. This work was carried out in a dedicated shock tube facility using very high speed cinematography, and produced the first detailed movies of the first few milliseconds of the breakup process.
Gordon has always been an enthusiastic and popular teacher with undergraduates. He was a five-time recipient of the AIAA Outstanding Faculty Adviser Award, he received the George Taylor/I.T. Alumni Society Distinguished Teacher Award in 1979, and the Institute of Technology Student Board Best Instructor Award in 1998 and 2003.
Since 1972 Gordon has served in several administrative positions. He was associate head of the Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics Department from 1972 to 1983, associate dean for academic affairs of I.T. from 1983 to 1991, including a concurrent position as joint acting head of the Computer Science Department for the year 1990-1991, and acting dean from 1991 to 1993. He was also the equal opportunity officer for I.T. from 1983 to 1990, for which in 1986 he was the first recipient of the Lillian Williams Award for Contributions to Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action. He has served on numerous University and I.T. committees, including the University Senate, the University Sexual Harassment Board, co-chair of the executive planning committee for the EE/CS building, chair of the committee to write the I.T. constitution, and the I.T. consultative committee. Gordon received the George Taylor Distinguished Service Award in 1994.
Gordon claims that probably his most exciting project was as co-director of the “Building a New World” event which involved over 10,000 schoolchildren from across Minnesota working throughout the academic year 1992-1993 to make their small part of the “New World”, and culminated with over 8,000 of them coming to Northrop Mall on May 4, 1993 to build a 42-foot-diameter globe in front of Northrop Auditorium. The Board of Regents presented Gordon with a Certificate of Appreciation for this project.