Sad News: Colin Steel
Sept. 5, 2019
Dear Colleagues,
I am sad to report that Professor Emeritus Colin Steel of the Department of Chemistry died peacefully in hospice on the evening of August 26, 2019 at the age of 86 after a short illness. He leaves behind his wife of many years, Ginny, their three children Brian, Alan and Jennifer, and several grandchildren. Colin’s memorial service will be Saturday, September 21 at 3:00 PM at First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Wayland, 225 Boston Post Road, Wayland, MA.
Colin was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1933. His early childhood was spent in India, where his father managed a tea plantation in Assam. When the Japanese threatened it in WWII, Colin and his mother were sent home to Scotland. For Colin, education meant George Watson’s Boys’ College, and the University of Edinburgh – where he thrived. He completed his B.Sc. in at Edinburgh in 1955. Unusually in those days, he formed a friendship with a senior faculty member, in this case Professor A. C. Aitken (Applied Mathematics), providing him the mathematical basis for his subsequent career in chemistry. He obtained his Ph. D. degree in physical chemistry working with Aubrey Trotman-Dickenson a leading authority on gas phase kinetics in 1958.
Halfway through his Ph.D. in Edinburgh Colin met his future wife, Ginny, at St. Andrew’s where she an undergraduate from Swarthmore on a junior year abroad. After being separated for a year they both completed their degrees in time for their wedding in the Scottish Highlands in 1958. It would take them several years before they would settle at Brandeis. Colin had postdoctoral stints with Michael Szwarc at Syracuse University, and at Brandeis University with Henry Linschitz. He briefly held a junior faculty position at Toronto (until Colin learned that the position was paid less than the departmental glassblower) and then worked at Itek on Route 128. Finally, Saul Cohen, by then Dean at Brandeis, said to Colin: “We need you here” … which we did. Then, as now, industry paid much better than the university; nonetheless, Colin, with Ginny’s encouragement, left corporate America to make his mark in the intellectually vibrant university setting.
Colin rose through the ranks at Brandeis, receiving tenure in 1966, becoming a full Professor in 1977, and serving as the department chair from 1980-1983. Colin and Ginny actively participated in the life of students at Brandeis. For example, they supported the Wien International Scholarship Program by hosting and looking after many an uprooted, bewildered young student from, among others, Sri Lanka and India. The warmth and fellowship they provided created a loyalty to Brandeis on the part of these students that is felt to this day. Within the department, as chair of the graduate studies committee, Colin helped incoming graduate students to stand on their own academic legs, and to find mentors compatible with their interests and personalities.
Colin’s own research interests reflect the position that chemistry occupies in the pantheon of science. Chemistry ranges from almost purely mathematical chemical physics to more empirical and biological organic chemistry. Colin investigated how light and heat cause the fundamental molecules of life to break up and often become even more reactive and essential compounds. His genuinely warm and adaptable personality, together with his intrinsic intellectual gifts, enabled Colin to collaborate with an astonishing range of great talents, both local colleagues and international scientists. Colin’s mathematical and physical chemistry research partners included Henry Linschitz and Irving Epstein, from Brandeis, and Albert Weller from the Max-Planck-Institut Göttingen; in the field of organic chemistry he collaborated with Brandeis’s Saul Cohen, Myron Rosenblum, and Ernest Grunwald. Colin made seminal contributions to the pedagogy of chemistry. With physicist K. Razi Naqvi of the University of Trondheim, Norway, he showed how to extract complex dynamics information from raw data with only a spreadsheet.
Coming from a Scottish education based on tutorials, he taught undergraduates in the laboratory one on one. He demanded that they think critically, that they articulate and argue their critical thinking and that this attitude be central to their lives. The roots were Aristotelian and the Scottish Enlightenment. Students, perhaps initially wary, would hail the excellence of his teaching.
He would teach only modern methods and techniques in the advanced physical chemistry laboratory. Starting with commercial black boxes he would peel off the wrapping to expose the underlying scientific principles and devise experiments to demonstrate these. His last achievement was to design and build a portable teaching quadrupole mass spectrometer with his Brandeis colleague, Michael Henchman. Made of glass, students could easily see how the instrument functions. Wheeling it into the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston, he performed experiments instead of giving his scheduled talk. This instrument was featured in two articles and a cover for the Journal of Chemical Education in 1998 and is still used very successfully today for teaching mass spectrometry. Colin even resumed teaching after he became an emeritus professor in 2000, offering a well-regarded course in chemical kinetics.
I want to thank Colin’s colleagues Michael Henchman, Peter Jordan, Ken Kustin, and Barry Snider for pulling together the text for this memorial note. Colin was a cherished member of the Brandeis community including the Wednesday lunch group in the Faculty Club for retired faculty where I first met him. He was deeply committed to the mission and values of Brandeis and he will be sorely missed.
Sincerely,
Lisa M. Lynch, Provost