Professor Norman Chigier

 

Norman Chigier (August 2, 1933 – August 22, 2022) was born in Frankfort, South Africa into a strong Jewish family. He studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Witwatersrand, graduating in 1952. He then held a multitude of appointments at various institutions in Rugby, Holland and California. Eventually he became a Research Student of Henry Cohen’s at Queens’. He took his Ph.D. in 1961 and later was awarded an Sc.D. in 1977. His first academic appointment came in 1966 at the University of Sheffield, where he rose to a Readership. At that time, he studied the combustion of gaseous fuels and liquid fuel sprays. He took sabbatical leave to join a research team at NASA Ames and study trailing aircraft vortices and wake flows, which are common in combustors.  He produced some stunning visualizations of trailing vortices from the wake of a single engine aircraft. In 1981 he went to a chair at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, where he was Director of the Spray Systems Technology Center until his retirement. After his retirement, Chigier remained active in the scientific community, attending conferences. He was involved with the Automotive Engine Research Institute in Shanghai at Jiao Tong University, and he remained a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Napoli and at the Technion in Israel. He was a prolific writer and published several books on combustion and sprays. However, he is probably best known in the combustion community for founding in 1974 the successful review journal Progress in Energy and Combustion Science, which he edited until 2015. His well-known abilities at persuading people to “do a job for him” – he could do this in fluent Dutch, French, Hebrew or English - were a key element in ensuring the success of his journal.