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Hugh Scott Fogler Obituary

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Hugh Scott Fogler

Ann Arbor, MI

October 28, 1939 - August 21, 2021

Hugh Scott Fogler Obituary

Hugh Scott Fogler of Ann Arbor, Mich. passed away Saturday, August 21, 2021, at the University of Michigan Hospital surrounded by the love and presence of his wife and three children. He was 81. Scott – or Skip as he was often called by his wife, sister, and childhood and college friends – was born in Normal, Ill. to Ralph Waldo and Ann Fogler. He earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois (1962) and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado (1963; 1965), where he was named a distinguished alumnus in 1987. Scott spent his entire 56-year academic career with the chemical engineering faculty at the University of Michigan. In addition to teaching and researching for more than five decades, Scott served as Associate Dean of the College of Engineering (1981-1984) and Department Chair of Chemical Engineering (1985-1990).



Scott was always brimming with ideas and the urge to immediately follow up on them. Pivotal to his remarkable national and international impact, Scott authored or co-authored 12 textbooks, including Elements of Chemical Reaction Engineering and Essentials of Chemical Reaction Engineering. Throughout his career he assiduously, creatively, consistently, and meaningfully updated these textbooks, and they are currently used in an estimated 75% of the chemical engineering programs worldwide. Throughout his long career, Scott received many awards, honors, and accolades from national professional societies, as well as from the Department, College, U of M and other universities. Some of his recent honors include an honorary degree, doctor honoris causa, from Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain, (2017) and the F.J. & Dorothy Van Antwerpen Award for Service to AIChE (2019). He was one of five professors to receive the Michigan Distinguished Professor of the Year from the Michigan Association of State Universities (2020). Scott was very active in service to professional societies. His most notable service was to the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), where he served as president in 2009, and, among other achievements, created the long-running and much lauded Chem-E-Car Competition, which has drawn teams from more than 100 universities.



Scott loved to explore the world. Almost always accompanied by his wife, he travelled the globe professionally — from Brazil to South Africa to Thailand and most places in between — lecturing, teaching, and joyfully spreading his love of chemical engineering to generations of students. Together with their children, he and his wife, Janet, also enjoyed a Fulbright scholar stint in Norway in 1974 and a sabbatical in Sweden in 1982. He and Janet also spent four sabbaticals in England. In 1995, Scott was invited for the first time to lecture in South Africa. During that trip he was inspired to develop a decades-long program that brought South African students from the University of the Witwatersrand who had been greatly affected by their country’s apartheid policies to study here. In addition, he invited scores of students from India, Thailand, and Sweden to study in his lab and expand their engineering and life experiences. Forty-five Ph.D. students graduated from his well-funded research group which published more than 240 articles under his leadership. He loved teaching undergraduate and graduate “ChemE” courses as well as a course he created on strategies for creative problem solving.



But Scott’s true passion in life was his family. He met his wife, Janet, on a blind date in 1959 at the University of Illinois and they were together from that moment on, married 59 years, until his death. Together he and Janet had three children, Peter Scott Fogler of Ann Arbor; Robert Meadors Fogler of Englewood, Colo.; and Kristin Ann Bellini of Lakewood, Colo. He was the proud “FarFar” to four grandchildren: Maxwell, Joseph, Sophia, and Nicolas. When his children were younger, Scott was a baseball coach, an enthusiastic supporter of all of their activities (there were A LOT of piano recitals and 6 a.m. hockey games), and founder of the Ann Arbor branch of the father-daughter program at the YMCA that is currently part of the Y’s Adventure Guides. Together he and his family traveled and lived abroad, followed all of the U of M and Detroit sports teams, and were long-time campers at Camp Michigania on Walloon Lake. His family fondly remembers canoe trips down the Pine River, annual family fall picnics, the backyard ice rink he created each winter, and often tagging along to out-of-town conferences. Later in life, Scott and his family loved to spend hours sitting on porches, patios and decks, reliving stories of their life together. An avid cook and foodie, Scott’s CV always proudly included his certificate from the New Orleans School of Cooking as one of his academic achievements. Everything he did was infused with his trademark humor. He told jokes whenever he could, including in his textbooks and even as he knowingly neared the end of his life. He is survived by his wife, his three children, his four grandchildren, his sister Karen Ann Ilyin, and several nieces and their families.



In lieu of flowers, please consider donating to The Scott and Janet Scholarship Fund at the University of Michigan* or the First United Methodist Church of Ann Arbor, 120 S. State Street, Ann Arbor, Mich., 48105.



Read more about Scott’s extraordinary career at: www.che.engin.umich.edu/people/fogler-scott/



*Make checks payable to “University of Michigan” with memo “Scott and Janet Fogler Scholarship Fund.” Gifts to endowment funds will be administered as a permanent endowment under Michigan law and university policies. Mail checks to: Michigan Engineering, 1221 Beal Avenue, Suite G264, Ann Arbor, Mich., 48109. To give by credit card or other method, call the Engineering Gift Office at 734-647-7043.

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