Tributes & Reflections: 2025 Retiring Faculty & Staff

Mary Anne Boelcskevy—affectionately known as “Prof B” to uncountable students—joined Boston University’s African American and Black Diaspora Studies Program almost exactly 20 years ago in 2005. She joined us at the end of two much coveted W.E.B. Du Bois fellowships at Harvard University and with a robust profile of research in African American Literature. Despite teaching experiences at schools like Williams, Brown, Emerson, Brown and at Albert-Lüdwigs Universität in Freiburg, Germany, it would be at BU that her full commitment and skills as teacher, mentor, colleague would manifest in a program that without exaggeration was made possible by her efforts. Her classes, for example, were immediate feeders to the Minor, which when I arrived as program Director hovered around 40 students. This meant the program was ripe for the establishing of a Major. To do so was a process that depended on and merely expanded what Prof B had created and maintained over her time at the University.

One of the first things I did when I arrived at BU was take her to lunch. From that moment I began to spend time learning from her and learning how the wider program could benefit from what I called the “special sauce” of her teaching and advising. She was the first faculty member I met with, having spoken at length with the previous Director in advance of my arrival. It was clear from him and our Admin as well as from students that whatever identity our program had among undergrads was due to her classes as well as her incredible patience and strength in advising literally dozens of students per term and year. From our first meeting, it was clear that her passion for working with our students and for our program came with a surprising humility and penchant for self-effacement. Surprising because it was clear to everyone—or everyone else—that she was the heart and spirit of the program.

That self-effacing humility was often present in other ways. As Director of Undergraduate Studies and the person most knowledgeable about program memory, rituals and expectations, she could easily have claimed a great deal of space and authority. The same goes for her knowledge base in African American literature and criticism. But she carried her expertise and responsibilities lightly and with so much grace. And warmth. Mary Anne Boelcskevy always led with warmth.

Of course, there were those moments of remarkable cool. These were when a particular issue or argument instigated a passionate response. Those were my favorite moments. They were glimpses of the inner life that brought her to scholarship and higher education in the first place. In public events, group conversations and roundtable discussions her rich knowledge and deep political commitments appeared in concentrated bursts of critique and analysis. I would say to myself—and I’m sure our students and colleagues would too–“Go, Prof B!” Because for her, the core of our community was in fact ideas, those generated through literature and the experiences of African Americans as expressed through that literature. Though she will be deeply missed her imprint on our program will endure.

– Louis Chude-Sokei, Chair of African American & Black Diaspora Studies

Laurence (Larry) Breiner joined the English department at BU in 1973, after completing his PhD at Yale University. Over the course of his career, his research, teaching, and publications have had a dual focus: on the literature and culture of early modern Britain, especially the seventeenth century; and on contemporary Post-Colonial literatures, especially Caribbean drama and poetry. He is the author of two monographs, An Introduction to West Indian Poetry, published by Cambridge University Press in 1998; and Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry, published by Peepal Tree in 2008. He is also the author of over forty essays and chapters focusing on an impressively wide range of topics, from the complexity of metaphor in the seventeenth-century physician and writer Thomas Brown

e, to the early plays of the Saint Lucian poet and playwright (and BU faculty and Noble Prize winner) Derek Walcott. Larry’s scholarship has been supported by many major awards and fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Institute, and the Rockefeller Foundation and he has served on the editorial boards of important field publications, including The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and The Journal of West Indian Literature. In his many decades at BU, he supported our community in countless ways, serving on important committees at the university, college, and departmental levels, including chairing the Humanities Curriculum Committee, serving on both the University and College APT committees, and providing leadership at the departmental level as Associate and Interim Chair of the English department.  Colleagues and students alike have appreciated Larry’s thoughtfulness, commitment, and, above all, his wit and wisdom, and he will be much missed. We wish him all the best in his well-earned retirement.

– Amy Appleford, Chair of English

Professor John Butler’s illustrious career in Experimental Particle Physics is capped by the awarding of the Breakthrough Prize to his global collaboration at the ATLAS detector at CERN, at the Large Hadronic Collider. He came to Boston University in 1995 as a member of an acclaimed team that discovered the Top Quark at Fermilab, one of the fundamental elementary particles in our Universe. At CERN he participated in the momentous discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012. This particle confers mass to all of us, and its discovery is a historical event that will be remembered a thousand years from now. Professor Butler did exceptional service to our Physics department, serving as Associate Chair. The Physics department is grateful to Prof John Butler for his contributions as a  teacher, mentor and colleague.

– Andrei Ruckenstein, Professor of Physics

After 24 years of dedicated service at BU, Cheryl (Sherry) Crombie retires as Department Administrator for the History of Art & Architecture Department. Sherry has been the heart of the department, known for her professionalism and calm, steady leadership. For many of us, Sherry was the first friendly face that we met in the department and her warm welcome made a lasting impression. The HAA department is known for its collegiality and much of this is due to Sherry and her unwavering support of faculty, staff, and students. She kept everything running smoothly, and her absence will be felt for a long time. While we’ll miss her greatly, we are thrilled that she will now enjoy well-earned time on Cape Cod with her children, grandchildren, and new puppy.

– Cynthia Becker, Chair of History of Art & Architecture

Professor Joseph Fewsmith joined the Pardee School’s predecessor, the BU Department of International Relations, in 1991 as the second East Asia expert to join the faculty. Over the ensuing 34 years, he has been a central figure in the growth of the university’s East Asia programs and expertise, creating the East Asian Studies major and then directing it for a decade and a half, advocating for hiring and courses in the region and its languages, and nurturing younger faculty across the university. There is no part of BU’s current Asia profile that has not been shaped or influenced by Joe’s vision and commitment to scholarship and teaching. He also served as director of undergraduate studies twice, as director of the BU Center for the Study of Asia, and on multiple search committees and university committees, extending his impact to the full BU community. He was also a leader among Chinese politics scholars in greater Boston, including as the co-convenor of a Taiwan studies group at Harvard that met monthly for decades. Joe came of age as a China scholar when China was still largely off-limits to Americans. He pursued language training in Taiwan and focused his PhD research at the University of Chicago on historical materials, which later resulted in his 1985 book Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China: Merchant Organizations and Politics in Shanghai, 1890-1930. While Joe had started an academic career at Kent State University, by the time that book was published, he was working for the federal government at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), an open-source research organization that provided crucial and timely translations and analyses of foreign-language sources, including government publications and news media. During that time, Joe was immersed in Chinese-language publications issued by the still largely-closed Chinese Communist Party and government, developing an encyclopedic knowledge of Chinese elite politics and qualitative textual analysis skills that made him unrivaled in analyzing the personal networks and nuts-and-bolts administrative actions that underlay the behavior of the Chinese state.

Joe’s experiences of historical research, government service, and deep immersion in Chinese official texts and media were important in shaping his subsequent scholarship and teaching. While voraciously consuming the political science literature on China and Taiwan, he was suspicious of theory-driven research and uncritical use of trendy empirical methods. Joe consistently worked from the ground-up, always insisting that high-level theorizing needed to be built on a base of historical, political, and social knowledge and grounded in facts and actual discourse. In doing this kind of research, Joe’s extraordinary networks in China and the United States governments, universities, and thinktanks have been indispensable. His regular visits to China included extensive dialogue with officials and experts, and extended far beyond Beijing and Shanghai to provinces and localities that most foreign (and Chinese) experts never bothered to visit. The result has been that when Joe writes and speaks, he speaks with an authority based on thorough and detailed knowledge of actual governance practices.

Joe’s impact on the field of Chinese politics has been enormous. Joe consistently departed from the dominant paradigms in the literature on Chinese politics—and was always right. Beginning with his work on elite politics, including such books as The Dilemmas of Reform in China: Political Conflict and Economic Debate (M.E. Sharpe, 1994) and Elite Politics in Contemporary China (M.E. Sharpe, 2001), he demonstrated the diversity of views within Chinese intellectual circles and elites when that diversity was not widely recognized among scholars. Over time, he expanded his focus to address broader questions of governance in China. In The Logic and Limits of Political Reform in China (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Joe produced the most accurate, grounded, comprehensive account of political experiences in 2000s China at a time when many scholars in the United States were focused on applying Western social scientific models and concepts to explain Chinese politics. In Rethinking Chinese Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2021), he redefined the way in which many scholars understand the nature of Chinese politics and institutions, showing that the role of institutions had been overestimated in the literature. Instead, what appeared to be stable, institutionally-constrained behavior in the pre- Xi Jinping era was more properly understood as resulting from a balance of power among competing factions. Joe also helped to educate generations of students with the two editions of his textbook China since Tiananmen and several edited volumes. And he even found time to write Forging Leninism in China: Mao and the Remaking of the Chinese Communist Party, 1927-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), a historical work on a largely understudied but formative period of the Chinese Communist Party. The book offered a corrective to Mao-focused scholarship on the Chinese revolution, emphasizing instead the role of local Communist organizations in the countryside. Beyond his written works, Joe’s extensive networks in China and the United States have allowed him to inform American policy makers and thought leaders about the realities of Chinese politics and to contribute to U.S.-China dialogue among researchers.

Of course, Joe’s most direct impact has been at BU, in the dozens of colleagues he has mentoredand led and in the thousands of students he has taught. When Joe began his career at BU, he was one of only three East Asia-focused social scientists at Boston University. Through the popularity of his courses and his tireless advocacy for the importance of the study of China and
East Asia, he has been a leader in building one of the strongest and most comprehensive Asia- focused faculties in the United States. As a mentor, Joe has shown exceptional kindness, demonstrating a concern for his mentees not just as scholars and teachers, but as individuals—as one writes, “Thanks in no small part to Joe, my years as an assistant professor were actually
enjoyable and happy.” Meanwhile, students have voted with their feet to join Joe’s classes, attracted not only by his deep knowledge but also his sardonic sense of humor and his evident enjoyment of trading perspectives with them. Their enduring loyalty to him is perhaps the best indication of Joe’s contributions to the Pardee School and to Boston University. Finally, as a person and intellectual, Joe remains remarkably kind, open-minded, and generous. He respects differing viewpoints and values the intelligence, insight, and agency of others. These qualities have earned him the respect of China scholars around the world and many friends within China.

– William W. Grimes, Chair of International Relations

Professor Greenfeld joined the University Professors program at Boston University in 1994, and was appointed as Professor in the Departments of Sociology, Political Science and Anthropology. Before coming to Boston University, she was the John Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University.  She received her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.     

A preeminent authority on nationalism, Professor Greenfeld is the author of the ground-breaking book Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Her other books include Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience and The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth.  She is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem.

Her works have been translated into 10 languages and have attracted a steady stream of visiting scholars from all corners of the globe, working with her on wide-ranging subjects.

During her time at Boston University, Professor Greenfeld taught courses on the sociology of culture, mental illness and modernity. Students in her classes were inspired and challenged by this highly original thinker who pushed them to to reflect on the world in novel ways. 

Juri Knjazihhin (Yuri Knyazikhin in scientific publications) joined Boston University in 1996 as a Research Associate Professor and was promoted to Research Professor in 2003. He received his M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from Tartu University, Estonia, in 1978 and his Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics from the N. I. Muskhelishvilli Institute of Computational Mathematics in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1985. Before his appointment at Boston University, he was a Research Scientist at Tartu University and the Institute of Astrophysics and Atmospheric Physics of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. He also held an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and worked at the University of Göttingen, Germany.

Professor Knyazihhin’s research centers on the application of radiative transfer theory to derive metrics of global vegetation functioning from satellite observations, supporting climate change research. He developed an algorithm, based on the physics of photon transport and interactions in natural media, for estimating green leaf area and absorbed photosynthetically active radiation by vegetation on Earth. This algorithm has been successfully implemented in five NASA satellite sensor programs, generating multi-decadal data products utilized in numerous climate modeling studies. Understanding the dynamics of leaf area enables the quantification of energy, mass, and momentum exchange between the Earth’s surface and the planetary boundary layer, contributing to our understanding of surface climate. Furthermore, quantifying the radiation absorbed by vegetation allows for the assessment of atmospheric carbon drawdown through photosynthesis, which plays a role in mitigating global warming.

Professor Knyazikhin is particularly renowned for his discovery of spectral-invariant properties within the physics that describes radiative transfer in highly heterogeneous media such as vegetation canopies. This is especially relevant when the size of the scattering elements is significantly larger than the wavelength of radiation. The fundamental concept underscores that simple algebraic combinations of leaf and canopy spectral reflectances become independent of wavelength. This results in a small set of structural variables that are sensitive to factors such as forest cover, tree density, crown geometry, and forest type. This groundbreaking discovery enables highly optimized algorithms for the remote sensing of vegetation and facilitates their practical implementation for daily mapping of the 100 million square kilometers of Earth’s surface covered by vegetation.

Since his arrival at Boston University, Professor Knyazikhin has contributed to 30 projects funded by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) as both a Principal Investigator  and a Co-Investigator. He has served as a Science Team Member for NASA’s MODIS, MISR, and the Deep Space Climate Observatory. His contributions also extend to the NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change Program and the U.S. DoE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program. Furthermore, he has been an active member of the American Geophysical Union, where he has organized several special sessions focused on the physics of remote sensing of vegetation at their meetings.

Professor Knyazikhin has played a significant role in the training of over 25 Ph.D. students and has supervised numerous visiting research fellows. He has authored and co-authored approximately 170 peer-reviewed publications, with about 45% of these publications having been led by graduate students under his guidance. He also taught a course on the physics and mathematics of remote sensing at Boston University for several semesters.

We extend our sincere congratulations to Yuri on his retirement and wish him the very best in his endeavors beyond Boston University.

((Tribute))

Robert Pinsky arrived at Boston University from the University of California Berkeley in 1989, making this academic year his thirty-sixth at BU. That in itself is a long and valuable teaching career, but measured in terms of the programs he has brought to poetry in general and to the BU Creative Writing Program in particular, his contribution is particularly impressive. In 1998, as the initiative associated with his service as Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert began the Favorite Poem Project, what is by now a major archive of recordings of Americans from all walks of life reciting poems that have been meaningful to them. Headquartered in the Creative Writing Program, this resource will continue to be available to the public in the years to come under the auspices of the BU Center for the Humanities. In 2001, Robert established a Creative Scholars Program with the nearby Boston Arts Academy, a City of Boston public arts high school, that allowed our MFA poets to teach at the high school
level. That program is still a major resource for our students, who gain valuable secondary school teaching experience there.

Beginning in the spring of 2005, and with the philanthropic support of Nancy Livingston, Robert curated two poetry readings each year as part of the Robert Lowell Memorial Series, in which a senior poet was paired with a BU MFA poetry alumnus, thereby celebrating the fellowship of creative writers. The roster of senior poets in the series’ twenty-year history is impressive enough, and includes Seamus Heaney, Louise Glűck, John Ashbery, Rita Dove, and others, but one result of the series has been that poets who attended these readings as students have returned to read as established poets, including Erin Belieu, Peter Campion, and Carl Phillips. Apart from these unique programs and initiatives, Robert has been a crucial teacher in the Poetry MFA Program at BU. Among Robert’s works are a handbook, The Sounds of Poetry, which he uses in his workshop, and an anthology called Essential Pleasures: a New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud. These two books in particular make clear a remarkable dimension of Robert’s teaching of the art of poetry: namely, the primacy of the oral and the aural, even in poems intended for a print medium. Robert has an uncanny ability to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of a poem on the basis of how it sounds when read aloud. And this in turn must be related to his love of music, in particular jazz, and his evolution of one further innovation in the field of poetry, which is a series of groundbreaking shows called POEMJAZZ in which he performs his poems in the company of jazz musicians. In fact, there is hardly any collaborative possibility for poetry—with opera, with stage drama, with translation—in which Robert has not been involved.

There is no point in reciting the titles of Robert’s nine books of poems, three books of translation, three Collected or Selected volumes, eight books of prose, and numerous edited anthologies. In this year’s BU Creative Writing Program Faculty Reading, Robert read a new poem called “The Angel of Retail.” The slightly wiseguy quality of the title is characteristic of Robert, and in fact the poem begins “Spirit of grace in the taffy machine’s chrome arms…” and catalogues such establishments as Dlugos’ Ladies Hats, Lewis’ Meats and Sundries, Hirsch’s Footwear, and Slade’s Barbecue. But in doing so it wanders—characteristically wanders—into other worlds and other authors, including Mark Twain and Walter Benjamin and Bruno Schulz. It also invokes Elizabethan playwright and poet Ben Jonson: because Robert’s Ph.D. from Stanford involved him deeply in Renaissance English poetry, and in the incomparable marriage of poetry with music that was practiced in that age. Maybe that is where Robert’s musicality comes from.

Long ago Robert transformed the landscape and people of his hometown of Long Branch, New Jersey into a mythical world in poems that are by now part of the national imagination. But through later books such as his Proverbs of Limbo (2024) or At the Foundling Hospital (2017) or Gulf Music (2007), Robert has created an instantly-recognizable and distinctly American voice, one that moves seamlessly through history and folklore and language itself, one that proclaims., and indeed demands, that poetry must have a free run of the human imagination. His voice is distinctly American because, no matter how much the political spirit of our time may try to deny it, in its destructive nostalgia for a monochromatic and nonexistent past, the United States has always been restless and polyglot and mixed in just the way that Robert’s poetry is. That resourcefulness has been his contribution to poetry—and to Boston University.

– Karl Kirchwey, Professor of English

Carl Ruck came to BU in 1965. He is now one year shy of having taught 60 years at BU. Needless-to-say, it will be hard to think of BU Classics without Carl.

Carl’s great passion as a teacher was Greek and Roman mythology. What now is a signature course in Classics departments, then was a fledging course. Designing his course around Jungian archetypes, Carl was one of the pioneers in the field and he was very good at it. At its height, Carl’s Greek and Roman Mythology class drew close to 500 students a term, taught in Morse Auditorium. Years later, with B. D. Staples, Carl turned that material into a textbook, The World of Classical Myth: Gods and Goddesses: Heroines and Heroes (1994). Carl’s other passion in the classroom was the teaching of Ancient Greek, which also resulted in a textbook, Ancient Greek: A new Approach (1967, revised 1969), that followed by Latin: A Concise Structural Course (1987). In my upper-level Greek classes, I could always tell which students had taken Greek with Carl, because they read ancient Greek aloud beautifully, almost as if it was English, with all the right cadences, pauses, and points of emphasis in a sentence.

Carl started college at Clark University, before transferring to Yale where he was pre-med, majoring in psychology and Classical Philology, graduating in 1958. It was in his senior year at Yale, if you can believe it, that Carl taught my mother Ancient Greek. I was 9 and can still picture my mother at the dining-room table writing out her verb forms in that strange script. I also remember her telling me what a good teacher she had. Carl went to Michigan for his MA and then Harvard for his PhD, graduating in 1965, where he was trained in textual criticism and epigraphy, very conventional subjects in those days. Straight from Harvard, he came to BU and quickly began to expand his horizons, starting with his course on Greek and Roman mythology and drawing on his undergraduate passion for psychology. I’ve already suggested how popular this course was.

But Carl’s lasting contribution to Classics lies in his work on psychoactive agents used in ancient religious ceremonies. His most famous book, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, co-authored with the ethno-mycologist R. Gordon Wasson and the chemist Albert Hoffman, argues that the secret ingredient, kykeon, added to the wine at the crowning moment of the Eleusinian Mysteries, contained Ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus naturally appearing in fermented wheat. The book has been translated into five languages and been reissued in 20ieth and 30ieth year editions.

In a later book, Persephone's Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion (1986), the same team gave currency to a word that has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary: entheogen, literally “to be filled with the god,” as an alternative for terms such as "psychedelic", "hallucinogen" and "drug" used to refer to a god-induced state that can bring mind-altering states of consciousness. Carl’s research returned to public prominence again in 2020 thanks to The Immortality Key, a New York Times bestseller largely based on his research.

Altogether, Carl has published over 10 books and 60 articles on entheogens in Greek and Christian mythology and ritualistic or shamanistic practices. One of the ironies of the Classical profession is that many of the most prominent scholars of Greek religion are Swiss-born rationalists who shun any suggestion of chemical substances entering illuminated Greek religious practice. References in the ancient testimonia to altered states of consciousness are “auto-induced,” not drug induced, the argument goes. Carl’s books are still largely ignored by many trained classicists but I’d say that good betting money is on Carl’s entheogens.

– Stephen Scully, Chair of Classics

James (Jim) Siemon joined the English department at BU in 1977 as an assistant professor after completing his Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research, teaching, and publications concentrate on the literature of early modern England, with particular focus on drama, especially by Shakespeare. He is the author of two monographs on Shakespeare, both of which explore, from different perspectives, the playwright’s verbal image-making and the socio-linguistic interaction between early modern literature and practical, everyday discourse: Shakespearean Iconoclasm, published in 1985 by University of California Press, Berkeley, and Word Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance, published in 2002 by the University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst. Alongside dozens of articles and chapters on various aspects of Renaissance literature and culture, he has made a substantial contribution to the field of early modern studies through his work as editor. He has edited plays by Shakespeare (Richard III and Julius Caesar) and Christopher Marlowe (The Jew of Malta), as well as Thomas Preston’s Cambises for The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama. As well as these important editions, he was a long-standing co-editor of one of the field’s flagship journals, Shakespeare Studies, and served on the Folger Institute Central Executive Committee since 1997. Over his many decades at BU, Jim served the community in numerous ways, including as Associate Chair of the English department for over decade, from 1997-2008. But perhaps his most significant contribution to the English department was his work with graduate students, as teacher, dissertation supervisor, and mentor.  Supervisor or second reader to dozens of PhD projects, an impressive number of his graduate students are now thriving in tenure track positions or jobs in higher education and policy. Above all, his former students and colleagues know him as a builder and sustainer of community, especially for those working in the field of early modern British literature and culture. We thank Jim sincerely for all he’s given us and wish him the very best for all his future ventures beyond Boston University.

– Amy Appleford, Chair of English

Nina Silber has been an active scholar, teacher, mentor, and administrator across her 35 years in the History Department. She retires as one of this country’s foremost historians of the Civil War and a leading historian of women. She is the author of five highly acclaimed books and co-editor of three scholarly collections.

At Boston University, Professor Silber has served as Chair of the History Department, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Studies, and Director of the American Studies Program. She has received the department’s Gitner Award for Excellence in Teaching (2019) and the College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence (2000). She has directed 15 doctoral dissertations at Boston University.

For the past 35 years, Nina Silber has been a model of collegiality: firm in her convictions, generous in praise for others, and a tremendously hard worker. She has a gift for drawing out the best in other people and can find the humor in most every situation (including those that aren’t funny). By her work and by her spirit, she has been central to the life of the History Department.

– James H. Johnson, Chair of History

Professor C. Eugene (Gene) Wayne retires as a trail-blazer in mathematics. He transformed the fields of dissipative and dispersive partial diferential equations (PDEs), which have been studied by scientists for over 300 hundred years. He showed how to think of them as infinite-dimensional dynamical systems. Coupled with his extraordinary technical prowess (developed as an undergraduate at UVa and a PhD student in Physics at Harvard), his brilliant ideas enabled him to pioneer the theory of infinite-dimensional manifolds to study the dynamics, stability, and bifurcations of solutions of key PDEs arising in physics, fluid mechanics, optics, and Hamiltonian systems.

In 1997, Gene moved to BU, after he was already famous for extending the celebrated Kolmogoroff-Arnold-Moser theory from the classical realm of finite-dimensional Hamiltonian systems to the much richer and more challengeing realm of infinite-dimensional Hamiltonian systems and the PDEs of mathematical physics. In his almost 30 years at BU, his research has continued to flourish, with transformative new results about the infinite-dimensional invariant manifolds in the Navier-Stokes equations and dissipative PDEs. In all, his research has not only had a deep, foundational mathematical impacts, but it has also significantly improved human understanding of water waves, solitons, vortex dynamics, resonant dynamics, pattern formation, and other central scientific phenomena.

For his many outstanding research projects, he earned more than 40 years of continuous research support from the National Science Foundation. For his outstanding accomplishments, he was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, as well as of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Gene has truly been a scholar in every sense of the word. He has been deeply commited to teaching at all levels, and recognized with local and national teaching awards. Also, many of the PhD students and postdocs he has trained have become internationally-recognized leaders in their own rights. All the while, Gene has remained characteristically kind and modest: “a colleagues’ colleague.” He has not lost the roots and values instilled in him by his parents and grandparents from the time he grew up in Moundsville, West Virginia.

Many a hearty congratulations on your retirement, Gene! and best wishes for all of your endeavors in your next chapters.

– Tasso Kaper, Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics