MIT, in common with other venerable institutions--including the institution of language itself--has its share of mysteries, amongst which is the fate of the elusive second “i” in the surname of Prof. Ron Latanision, who has embraced emeritus status after 28 years at MIT. He is by no means retired but will continue to be involved with MIT as he makes a career shift to industry as a principal of Exponent, Inc. Hardly a stranger to the corporate world, Ron came to MIT after five years at Martin Marietta and is co-founder of Altran Corporation.
There is nothing else elusive about the highly prominent Prof. Latanision who has held faculty appointments in both DMSE and Nuclear Engineering and was director of the H.H. Uhlig Corrosion Lab and the Materials Processing Center. In 1991, he was appointed chair of MIT’s Council on Primary and Secondary Education and began MIT’s K--12 outreach. He directed the MIT Science and Engineering Program for Teachers, co-chaired the New England Science Teachers organization, and served as co-PI of an NSF-sponsored Massachusetts initiative on Partnerships Advancing Learning of Mathematics and Science. For his efforts on MIT’s behalf, the Association of MIT Alumni/Alumnae named him an honorary alumnus in 1992.
Trained as a corrosion engineer, with degrees in metallurgy and metallurgical engineering from Penn State (BS ’64) and Ohio State (PhD ’68), Ron was a von Humboldt Senior Scientist at the Max-Plank-Institut für Eisenforschung in Düsseldorf. He has researched aqueous corrosion, stress-corrosion cracking, hydrogen embrittlement, photoelectrochemistry, aging of engineering materials and systems, and supercritical water oxidation of toxic wastes. He co-edits Advances in the Mechanics and Physics of Surfaces, and serves on the editorial boards of Progress in Surface Science and the Journal of the Iron and Steel Institute of Japan. He has held a visiting professorship at the University of Naples since 1989.
He is an NAE member and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Society for Metals, and the National Association of Corrosion Engineers (NACE), serving as a NACE director. He won NACE’s Campbell Award and Whitney Award, the Mac Farland Award from Penn State’s NACE chapter, AIME’s Henry Krumb lectureship, the T.P. Hoar Award, was named a centennial scholar at both Case Western Reserve University and Penn State, and was named a distinguished Ohio State alumnus. He served as science advisor to the US House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee (1982--83), on the advisory committee for the Massachusetts Office of Science and Technology, and as education advisor to Senator Paul Tsongas’ presidential campaign. In 2002 President Bush appointed him to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.
The mystery of the elusive “i” is compounded by Ron’s spouse Carolyn, who remains truer to her husband’s Ukrainian origins by steadfastly pronouncing it. Carolyn is a nationally recognized painter in oils and watercolors and a member of the prestigious Copley Society of Boston. MIT and DMSE are the poorer for the departure of this accomplished partnership, for both of whom an emeritus title, appropriate to its latinate origins, is deservedly accorded e meritus: “out of having served [meritoriously].”
by Prof. Linn Hobbs