Dr. Meredith Gourdine (In History) - September 26, 1929 - November 20, 1998

Dr. Meredith Gourdine was born in Newark New Jersey on September 26, 1929, and grew up in the streets of Harlem and Brooklyn. Meredith Gourdine attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and received a Ph.D. in Engineering Science from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. He was an excellent physicist who pioneered the research of electrogasdynamics. He also won a silver medal in the long jump at the Helsinki Olympic Games in 1952. He was responsible for the engineering technique termed Incineraid for aiding in the removal of smoke from buildings. His work on gas dispersion developed techniques for dispersing fog from airport runways. Dr. Gourdine served on the Technical Staff of the Ramo-Woolridge Corporation from 1957-58. He then became a Senior Research Scientist at the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1958-60. He became a Lab Director of the Plasmodyne Corporation from 1960-62 and Chief Scientist of the Curtiss-Wright Corporation from 1962 to 1964. Dr. Gourdine established a research laboratory, Gourdine Laboratories, in Livingston, New Jersey, with a staff of over 150. Dr. Gourdine has been issued several patents on gasdynamic products as a result of his work. Later on in his life Dr. Gourdine suffered from diabetes, and lost his vision and one leg. He did not let blindness deter his creative work.
In 1991 Dr. Gourdine was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and in 1994 he was inducted to Engineeering and Science Hall of Fame (Dayton, Ohio). Dr. Gourdine is the inventor of Focus Flow Heat Sink, used for computer chip cooling.

Site referring to Dr. Meredith Gourdine:
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blgourdine.htm