James S. Ultman, distinguished professor of chemical engineering and bioengineering, retired from the University on June 30.
Ultman began his career as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) post-doctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota. In 1970, he joined the chemical engineering department as assistant professor of chemical engineering. In 1976 he became associate professor and in 1981 was appointed professor. In 1999, he was named distinguished professor of chemical engineering.
The following year Ultman became chair of the intercollege graduate degree program in physiology. In this role, he coordinated the activities of 40 faculty members from the Colleges of Agriculture, Engineering, Science, and Health and Human Development, and coordinated the program with a sister program at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center.
His research interests included bioheat and biomass transport, biomedical instrumentation, artificial organs, respiratory transport dynamics and dosimetry of inhaled air pollutants.
During his career at Penn State, Ultman was responsible for creating seven new undergraduate and graduate courses with such topics as Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid mechanics; mass transfer and chemical separations; and transport phenomena in biomedical systems.
In addition, Ultman spent one year as an associate professor of chemical engineering at Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, on a Fulbright-Hays Senior Lectureship; and one year as a visiting professor in the respiratory division of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.
In 1987, Ultman was given the Penn State Engineering Society's Outstanding Research Award. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and the Biomedical Engineering Society.
Ultman was instrumental in the academic development of the Department of Bioengineering at Penn State. Additional service to the University included participation in promotion and tenure committees, internal review committees and the Huck Institute of the Life Sciences. Ultman has chaired numerous departmental committees including the chemical engineering graduate program committee and the chemical engineering department head search committee.
He has published more than 70 articles in refereed journals and contributed to nine books. He has presented more than 100 papers at technical and professional meetings and conferences and has contributed to scientific workshops and review panels convened by the NIH and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Throughout his teaching career, Ultman has mentored more than 50 graduate students and has served as a research adviser to many undergraduate students.
He received his bachelor of science in chemical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology and his master's and doctoral degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware.