Brooks Appointed Dean Of Engineering Division

Harvey Brooks, Gordon Mckay Professor of Applied Physics, will become Dean of Engineering and Applied Physics on September 1, the University announced yesterday.

Brooks, a specialist in nuclear power and solid state physics, is in England this year conducting research as a Guggenheim Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge.

He will succeed John H. Van Vleck, who plans to resume his research in mathematical physics. Van Vleck, Hollis Professor or Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, expects to prepare an enlarged edition of his "Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities."

Brooks, a Gordon McKay Professor here since 1950, has done research in the cohesive energy of alkalis, metal interfaces, lattice imperfections in metals, and the theory of electrical properties of germanium and silicon.

During World War II, he was Research Associate of the Underwater Sound Laboratory at the University, working on methods of combating submarines. He continued this work as Professor of Engineering Research and Assistant Director of the Ordnance Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University.

As Research Associate and Associate Laboratory Head of the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory from 1946 to 1950, he took part in the design of General Electric's first nuclear reactor.

Brooks was a delegate to the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955, and serves on the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards of the Atomic Energy Commission and on several other scientific committees for the government.

The new dean is editor-in-chief of a new international journal, "The Physics and Chemistry of Solids."