Serge Gratch, 101st ASME President, Dies (12/18/07) Serge Gratch, P.E., Ph.D., professor emeritus, Kettering University, Flint, Mich., and 101st president of ASME, died Dec. 4, at the age of 86. His career spanned more than five decades as a research scientist and professor with distinguished contributions in the areas of the thermodynamic properties of gases, development of successful automotive exhaust control systems, alternative fuels, polymer kinetics, viscoelasticity, and engineering education. Serge Gratch A member of ASME since 1944, a Fellow since 1968, and an Honorary Member since 1980, Gratch was active in many areas, including a 20-year membership on the ASME Standing Committee on Thermophysical Properties (1950–70), the ASME Policy Board Research (1972–77), member of the Committee on Planning and Organization (1978–81) and member of the Committee on Research Needs (1978–81). He has also published 29 technical papers. He was regional editor of the International Journal of Fracture and a member of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Polymer Science. Gratch served as president of ASME in 1982–1983. He was a proponent of expanding technological literacy into liberal arts education, recognizing the role of technology as essential to the study of culture as a “new humanities.” His inaugural address also called for a new breed of engineer whose education and knowledge cut across the traditional engineering and scientific disciplines and an engineer’s commitment to lifelong learning. Gratch served as a member of the National Alcohol Fuels Commission from 1979 to 1981, following his appointment by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. He was also a member of the National Materials Advisory Board and of the Board of Directors of the Engineering Society of Detroit. He has served on numerous committees of the National Materials Advisory Board of the National Research Council and chaired its committee on Science Base for Material Processing. He was a member of the ASME Foundation Board of Trustees 1987–1993. Among his awards, he received the ASME Internal Combustion Engine Award in 1999. Gratch was born May 2, 1921, in Bologna in Italy. His family immigrated to the United States in 1939, where he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania and began working as a laboratory assistant studying the thermodynamic properties of moist air. There, Professor John Goff, then dean of the Towne Scientific School, became his mentor and introduced to him to mechanical engineering and ASME. Gratch received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, and his master’s and doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1943, 1945 and 1950 respectively. In 1974 the University honored him with the Alumni Award of Merit. He was a registered professional engineer in Michigan. With the Ford Motor Co. from 1961 to 1986, he initiated the electric car research program (1966) and later the alternative fuels program. He was appointed director of the chemical sciences laboratory of the Ford Motor Co. in 1972. Projects under his direction included control of automotive emissions, pollution from manufacturing, resource recovery and recycling, corrosion protection, and fuels and lubricants. Prior to joining Ford, he served as a research scientist for Rohm & Haas Co. and as associate professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. Following his retirement from Ford in 1986 until 1996, he was professor of mechanical engineering at GMI Engineering and Management Institute, now Kettering University. ASME Launches ASME Digital Library on the AIP Scitation Hosting Service ASME and the Scitation division of the American Institute of Physics will launch a comprehensive new ASME Digital Library in January. The ASME Digital Library consolidates the Society's numerous publications, including its 22 journals, into a single, seamless resource. More than 100 ASME annual conference proceedings volumes, as well as ASME Press e-Books, also will be available in the Digital Library. The ASME Digital Library will begin its incremental rollout in January 2008 and will become fully functional in the spring. Subscription access to current transactions journals, journals dating back to 1990, and more than 30,000 conference proceedings papers, both current and archival, will be made available on a single platform. Also included will be ASME Press e-Books dating back to 1999. With the ASME Digital Library, engineers, scientists, and librarians will have a full range of information, features, and services facilitated by the Scitation platform. These include free cross-journal searching, the ability to view individual articles online before the journal is printed, extensive links to primary publishers and databases, and a complete suite of personalization tools. “The new ASME Digital Library is an indispensable tool for mechanical engineers and engineers across a wide range of disciplines, as well as for scientists in allied fields,” said Philip DiVietro, ASME managing director of Publishing. “The site unifies access to all of ASME’s important publications through a single search interface that speeds and simplifies access to the Society’s journals and other research tools.” “Having Scitation host the ASME Digital Library will help solidify ASME’s position as the site more mechanical engineers consult on a daily basis,” said Paul DeCillis, director of Online Publishing for the American Institute of Physics. “ASME Digital Library users will enjoy many of the powerful features that AIP’s Scitation online platform enables for its more than 170 hosted publications.” Scitation is a division of the American Institute of Physics, a not-for-profit corporation chartered in 1931 to provide publishing and distribution services for scientific and technical societies.

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