Professor Chris Hall, former aerospace engineering blogger, but now department head at VPI and too busy to blog, checks in with a message:

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I have heard from many of you throughout the last 24 hours. I’m sure I speak for the entire department, when I say that we thank you for thinking of us and for your many thoughtful notes. It means a lot to us.

As far as I know there were no casualties from the department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering. We won’t really know that until the names are released though. My son is a sophomore in Engineering Science and Mechanics, which is the department that Occupies most of Norris Hall. He is safe, but his undergraduate research advisor was one of the fatalities.

The departments of Engineering Science and Mechanics and Civil and Environmental Engineering lost three good men, and there are several folks in the hospital. The three fallen professors are Liviu Lebrescu, Kevin Granata, and
G.V. Loganathan.

Liviu was an internationally known mechanician and was teaching a junior-level course on Solid Mechanics yesterday morning in Norris Hall. I did not know him well, but occasionally chatted with him about his home country of Romania.

Kevin was a young professor with a young family. His field was biomechanics, and my oldest son chose to major in ESM because he wanted to work in Kevin’s lab. My son, Duncan, a sophomore, has worked in Kevin’s biomechanics
lab for the past year. I thoroughly enjoyed Duncan’s stories of how Professor Granata was teaching him how to program nonlinear controllers for inverted pendula. I know Duncan will miss those lessons.

G.V. was an award-winning professor of environmental engineering, whose expertise was in water resources. Most recently he won the university’s prestigious Wine Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Again, I thank you all for your kind messages. I will let you know more when I know more. Please feel free to forward this email to friends and colleagues.