Montgomery T. Shaw - 2007 Distinguished Service Awardee

Montgomery T. Shaw received the Distinguished Service Award of The Society of Rheology at the 79th Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City. The ceremony may have come as a surprise to Monty, but not to any member of the Society in the past three decades. He is the eighth recipient of this honor, which is awarded infrequently at the discretion of the Executive Committee for exceptional service to the Society.

Monty has served the Society in elected office as Secretary (1977-1981), Member-at-Large (1983-1985), and Treasurer (since 1997). He has also served on the Bingham Award Committee (1989-1991), the Nominating Committee (1991), and as Technical Program Chair for the 62nd Annual Meeting in Santa Fe (1990). An appointment to the position of Associate Editor for Finance (1995-1997) prepared him for his current office, where he has overseen substantial growth in the financial resources and financial responsibilities of the Society.

Monty’s tenure as Treasurer followed that of Ed Collins, who had received the second Distinguished Service Award in 1986 and served as Treasurer for a total of twenty-six years. Monty may not break Ed’s record, but then again no one has overheard him to say that he won’t try. It’s hard to imagine a time when Monty won’t be serving the Society in some capacity - the position of Society Historian may not exist, but we all know the perfect candidate!

Monty received BChE and MS degrees in chemical engineering from Cornell University in 1966, and a PhD in chemistry (1970) from Princeton University, where he studied under the late Professor A.V. Tobolsky. He then worked in the R&D department of the Union Carbide Corporation in Bound Brook, NJ until 1977, when he joined the faculty of Chemical Engineering at the University of Connecticut. He now serves as Interim Head of the new Chemical, Materials and Biomolecular Engineering Department at UConn. Monty is associated with the nearby Institute of Materials Science where he conducts research on polymer solution and blend thermodynamics, polymer rheology and processing, and polymer aging. He has received numerous rewards for his research and scholarship.

Monty is an avid outdoorsman. His wife Maripaz is well known to many members of the Society and his son Steven is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Montana State University in Bozeman.