William "Bill" Roberts, Jr.

About

Professor Roberts came to the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia as an assistant professor in 1969.   In 1974, he was promoted to associate professor;   in 1982, he became full professor;  in 1992, he was awarded the endowed-chair Commonwealth Professor  of Engineering and Applied Science;  and in 2004, he accepted the appointment to serve as the School’s Director of Applied Mathematics.  The University’s Board of Visitors appointed Professor Roberts, at his retirement in 2010, Professor Emeritus. 

Professor Roberts established the School’s Mathematical-Computational Modeling Laboratory; and in part as its Director, his professional work focused on the formulation of scientific and engineering problems in mathematical terms, capturing the dominant physical processes and fundamental dynamical mechanisms, and the solution of the mathematical equations in the models thus formulated. His work spans a broad range of phenomena and events observed in nature and the laboratory, including the dynamics of the gaseous interstellar medium in spiral galaxies, with the discovery of the formation of large-scale galactic shock waves triggering star formation along the spiral arms, rarefied and hypersonic gas flows, industrial prototype technologies for fiber processing operations, and fibrous assemblies and their compression and decompression. He is author or co-author of more than 100 refereed journal publications, books, national and international conference papers, and annual review articles. He presented over 200 technical lectures and colloquia throughout the U.S., Switzerland, England, Australia, Italy, France, The Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Canada, Japan, Finland, Greece, and Scotland. Over the years, he received more than $2.5 million in grants from various government agencies and private industries in support of his work, including the M.S. and Ph.D. graduate students and postdoctoral fellows he supervised and with many of whom he published. 

Professor Roberts received the 1990 NCR-University Stakeholder Innovation Award for his scientific work on mathematical modeling and computer algorithm development pertinent to industrial prototype technologies and fiber production and was nominated for "Virginia’s Outstanding Scientist" in 1991. The University of Virginia’s Office of Afro-American Affairs honored him with its 1980 Distinguished Teaching Award, and the School of Engineering and Applied Science honored him with its 2005 Instructor of the Year Award for Distance Learning. Among his professional memberships during his career are the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Astronomical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the International Astronomical Union, Sigma Xi, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Fiber Society, and the Virginia Academy of Science. He is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in Science and Engineering, and Who’s Who in American Education. 

Professor Roberts carried out consulting work for various industrial firms, including Dupont, Amoco Fabrics and Fibers, and Hercules, and held appointments as visiting scientist at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in France, the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, the Stockholms Observatorium in Sweden, and the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, as well as the State University of New York, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Kitt Peak National Observatory, the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, the NASA Langley Research Center, and the NASA Ames Research Center. Among these visiting appointments were honorary awards of NORDITA Guest Professorship in 1974-75 and National Research Council Senior Research Associateship in 1989. 

Education

S.B. Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1964 

Ph.D. Applied Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1969