Rice’s Hellums to Retire After 38 Years

Rice’s Hellums to Retire After 38 Years
BY LIA UNRAU
Rice News Staff
April 16, 1998

When David Hellums formally retires at the end of this academic year after
38 years as a professor at Rice, he will take on a new role&emdash;that
of research professor. He’ll also have more time for his other passions.

While he will miss teaching, he will be able to continue his research and,
he said, "I need to have more time for my tennis game, which has been slipping
a little, and my boat needs more attention, my wife needs more attention, and
my grandchildren need more attention."

Hellums has sailed for more than 25 years, recently upgrading to a 38-foot
catamaran. He says he just "dabbles," but those dabblings have taken
him and his wife Marilyn down the Texas coast, in the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands,
along the coast of Venezuela, and in the Mediterranean Sea.

As the A.J. Hartsook Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering,
and an associate of Wiess College, Hellums turned out a large number of outstanding
Ph.D. students, helped found Rice’s Biomedical Engineering Laboratory and helped
shape one of Rice’s strongest research programs.

He will continue to focus on his two main areas of research: blood cell engineering
and thrombosis research, and microvascular transport including the development
and evaluation of blood substitutes.

"I have always been very impressed with David as a leader, as a scholar
and as a gentleman," said Michael Carroll, dean of engineering. "I
was also impressed by the fact that he kept an active research career going
while he was dean and continued it very smoothly. He has done excellent work
himself and he really has a lot to do with the formation of an outstanding group
in bioengineering."

Hellums was the first engineer to receive the Merit Research Award from the
National Institutes of Health, a 10-year grant which has been extended twice
to give Hellums 20 years of NIH funding. He received the Whitaker Award of the
Biomedical Engineering Society, and this year was elected to the National Academy
of Engineering, one of the highest honors bestowed on an engineer. He was also
designated eminent scientist by the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research
in Japan, where he has held visiting professorships.

"David Hellums is very close to my idea of the perfect university professor,"
said Hardy Bourland, associate dean of engineering and a founding member of
the Biomedical Engineering Lab, along with founding director Bill Akers, professor
emeritus in chemical engineering, and Hellums. "He is kind, gentle, knowledgeable,
hard working, an outstanding person to work with."

Hellums, who grew up in Texas, joined the Rice faculty in 1960 after earning
chemical engineering degrees from the University of Texas and the University
of Michigan.

He was part of a group approached by Baylor surgeon Michael DeBakey, who wanted
to work with Rice researchers to develop an artificial heart. "I was not
biologically oriented at that time, I was into computational fluid mechanics,
but Dr. DeBakey sort of brainwashed us, explained to us what an exciting project
it was, and we joined on."

Among the first researchers to be working at the intersection of fliud mechanics
and biology, Hellums studied the basic problems of blood clotting and how heart
devices and blood flow affected blood and and vascular cells.

"Progress has been incremental but steady, and it has been very satisfying
to have been there first," Hellums said, "and then to see people all
over the world now following along and extending things far beyond what we have
done."

In 1964 he became a founding member of Rice’s Biomedical Engineering Lab and
later became director for 10 years. He was chair of the Department of Chemical
Engineering for six years. He is an adjunct professor in the Department of Medicine
at Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas Health Science Center.

Under his leadership as dean of engineering from 1980 to 1988, the Department
of Computer Science, the Computer and Information Technology Institute and the
Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering were formed and expanded.