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Mehmet Uz, professor and head of chemical engineering, died Saturday, Nov. 11, at a Philadelphia hospice. He was 53.
A funeral service is scheduled for noon Tuesday, Nov. 14, at the Mosque of Shaikh M. R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, 5800 Overbrook Avenue, Philadelphia, with burial immediately following in Westminster Cemetery, 701 Belmont Ave., Bala Cynwyd.
A College memorial service will take place at 2:00 p.m. Friday, Nov. 17, in Colton Chapel.
A member of the Lafayette faculty since 1986, Uz is survived by his wife, Selin Sinan-Uz ’02 (also known as Sultan Uz), and their two daughters.
Uz taught courses on the nature of engineering materials, engineered materials and manufacturing processes, and corrosion and corrosion prevention. He also developed and taught two seminars in Lafayette’s interdisciplinary Values and Science/Technology (VAST) series, “Materials in Art and Technology” and “Engineered Materials in Sports,” and a First-Year Seminar, “Materials and the (Un)Making of Civilizations.”
Uz was the recipient of Lafayette’s Carl R. and Ingeborg Beidleman Research Award recognizing excellence in applied research or scholarship. His research centered on refractory metals and their alloys, materials whose properties make them suitable for use in advanced power systems, including nuclear fusion reactors. A recipient of several grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and NASA. Uz conducted research in the Energy Technology Division of the energy department’s Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, each summer from 1995 through 2000 and as visiting scientist during the 2000-01 academic year during which he was on leave from Lafayette.
He also conducted research at the energy department’s Ames Laboratory, in Iowa, in the summers of 1986 and 1989, and in the Materials Division of NASA’s Lewis Research Center (now known as Glenn Research Center), in Cleveland, each summer from 1990 through 1994.
Uz authored numerous technical reports and papers for those agencies, as well as articles in academic publications such as Journal of Nuclear Materials.
He supervised more than a score of Lafayette students in independent and collaborative research projects and honors theses. During the most recent spring semester he led a contingent of six Lafayette students taking courses at International University Bremen, in Germany. He also served as adviser to the College’s Muslim Students Association.
A native of Senirkent, Isparta, Turkey, Uz earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Iowa State University, the last in 1985. He came to Lafayette that year as a visiting assistant professor and joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1986. He was promoted to associate professor in 1991 and to full professor in 1999.