Albert Co - 1999 Distinguished Service Awardee

Albert Co received the Distinguished Service Award of The Society of Rheology at the 71st Annual Meeting in Madison. He is the fifth recipient of this honor, which is given infrequently at the discretion of the Executive Committee for exceptional service to the Society.

The subtitle of this announcement would have had little meaning less than a decade ago. In his “Comments from the President” that appeared in the January 1995 Rheology Bulletin, Bob Armstrong requested a volunteer to create and maintain the Society of Rheology Home Page on the World Wide Web. He went on to explain "... that this would be an excellent means for us to disseminate information to members in a timely way, and also to reach others interested in rheology and let them know about the activities of the society.” Albert responded to this highly understated request and became our first and only Webmaster. With equally understated style and single-minded dedication, Albert Co has provided our society and the field of rheology with an extraordinary resource.

Less than five years later, glowing testimony to the impact of Albert’s stewardship comes from every corner of the Society, especially meeting organizers. “Serving as program chair with Albert as Webmaster is one or two orders of magnitude less work than it was 10 years ago.” Always generous when it comes to sharing credit, Albert notes that Bob Powell, as Technical Program Chair for the Columbus Meeting, was instrumental in establishing abstract submission over the Web because he was willing to accept the risk of the new technology.

Albert has recently secured the new base URL “www.rheology.org” (alternative: “www.societyofrheology. org”) and taken yet another important step toward making our website a natural portal for rheology information on the internet. The original URL “www.umche.maine.edu/sor/" still works and serves to remind us all of the generous support the Society has received from the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Maine since the inception of our e-endeavor.

Albert Co received a B.S. from the University of the Philippines in 1972 and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1979. He then joined the faculty in Chemical Engineering at the University of Maine in Orono where he is currently Associate Professor. Albert’s research interests center around polymer processing, non-Newtonian fluid dynamics, and transport phenomena.

The Society of Rheology is certainly very much in debt to Albert Co, the “cheerful perfectionist.”