Sheldon K. Friedlander, Parsons Professor of Chemical Engineering and director of the Air Quality/Aerosol Technology Laboratory at UCLA, died at his home in Pacific Palisades on February 9. He was 79. Friedlander’s field was the behavior of very small particles. Early in his career, he was hired by the Harvard School of Public Health on an Atomic Energy Commission contract to study the behavior of radioactive particles that might escape from nuclear reactors. From Harvard, he went to the University of Illinois, where his doctoral thesis, in 1954, was on particle deposition in turbulent gases. His first faculty appointment was at Columbia University in 1954. Three years later, he joined the department of chemical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. In 1958, following his first year at Hopkins, Friedlander drove to New York for a weekend where his mother, Rose, gave him the phone number of a young woman to call, and the address of a Saturday-night party in Manhattan hosted by her sister. He met Marjorie Robbins for the first time at the party, and eight weeks later, on August 17, they were married. In 1964, Shel joined the department of environmental health engineering at Caltech, with a joint appointment in chemical engineering. Here, in the 1970s, he devised a way to analyze existing data that measured the chemical makeup of smog particles. By doing so, he was able to unravel who–or what–was contributing to air pollution at any given time. Shel joined UCLA in 1978 and served as chemical engineering chair from 1984 to 1988. From 1978 to 1982, he headed the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, which provides independent advice to the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency. In 1982, he helped found the American Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR), and in 1997 AAAR established the Friedlander Award, recognizing an outstanding dissertation by a doctoral student in the field of aerosol studies. In 1983, Friedlander founded the school’s Air Quality/Aerosol Technology Laboratory and became its director. In the mid-1980s, the lab’s pollution detectives were searching for easier and cheaper ways to trap smokestack emissions and prevent pollution. Shel said, “We must find ways to control toxic wastes before they are produced rather than ways of disposing of them afterward.’ In 1987 at UCLA, he established the nation’s first engineering research center devoted entirely to solving the problem of hazardous waste management and served as its director for several years. Shel told an interviewer in 1996 that while looking at how very small particles are produced in, for example, coal combustion, he discovered that one of the biggest unknowns was the behavior of particles composed of about 100 or 1,000 molecules. The particles people had been concerned with were much bigger than that, composed of millions of molecules. Shel’s group worked on the generation of titanium particles. They collected the particles and found that they band together to form chains, and that the chains can be stretched. This exciting discovery suggested that such particle chains could be used to produce ceramic material with some of the properties of rubber. The dynamics of strained nanoparticle chain aggregates represented a new field of great potential importance to the synthesis of nanocomposite materials. Most recently, Shel was keenly interested in finding ways to defend against chemical and biological terrorism attacks, and in December 2006 was awarded a three-year contract with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to test his ideas. Shel lived for two years in France, as a Fulbright Scholar in 1960 and as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1969. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1975 in recognition of his work on the origins and control of particulate pollution. He was the author of ‘Smoke, Dust and Haze: Fundamentals of Aerosol Dynamics.’ Born November 17, 1927, in New York City, Shel was the only child of Irving Friedlander, a paper-box manufacturer, and his milliner wife, Rose. He interrupted his studies at Columbia University to serve in the Army just after World War II but returned to earn a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1949 and a master’s degree from MIT in 1951. He and his wife Majorie moved to the Palisades in 1980. Shel delighted in trout fishing in small streams in the Angeles National Forest, and attending lectures at the Getty Museum. He collected stamps and Persian rugs. He was a good dancer, and enjoyed listening to Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme and Lester Young. He sang popular songs of the 1930’s and 40’s or played them on his clarinet. His children remember their father as a great dancer who refused to go to Disneyland, which he viewed as a vacation destination–he rarely traveled unless he was invited to lecture. He watched little television, but often laughed out loud watching ‘Get Smart.’ He was surprised to find his name on a list of enemies during President Nixon’s administration. Biographies of Newton, Einstein and Niels Bohr, and the essays of Montaigne, were some of his favorite reading. In addition to his wife Marjorie, he is survived by four children: Eva Friedlander (husband Duane White) of La Jolla, Amelie Yehros (husband Ilan) and Zoe Friedlander (Barry Greenberg), both of Los Angeles, and Josiah Friedlander (Katrinka Wolfson) of Santa Monica; and eight grandchildren: Zachary and Lena White; Isaiah, Sam and Ella Yehros, and Aaron, Rose and Jack Greenberg. A memorial celebration will be held on Tuesday, May 22, from 2 to 5 p.m. at UCLA Hillel, Spiegel Auditorium, 574 Hilgard Ave. Donations in his memory may be made to the American Association for Aerosol Research, 15000 Commerce Parkway, Suite C, Mt. Laurel, NJ 08054.
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