MALCOM A. WEISS

WEISS--Malcolm Arthur, of Boston, Massachusetts died April 25, 2014 at the age of 88. He was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1926, the only child of Joseph Weiss (born Tosko Weitzenburch) and Rose Ellenbogen Weiss. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School, and received BS, MS, and PhD degrees from Columbia University, all in chemical engineering. From 1944-1946 he served in the US Navy. In 1948 he began work in research and development at the Exxon Corporation. His assignments began in research, and later moved to increasing management responsibility. At various times he was responsible for work on ramjet missile propulsion, rocket fuels, polymers, fuel cells, biological production of edible protein from oil, and underground combustion for recovering thick crude oil. In 1977, he moved from Union, NJ, to Boston, and joined the Energy Laboratory at MIT in Cambridge, MA. There he was the first Executive Director of the Center for Energy Policy Research, later the Deputy Director and subsequently co-Director of the Energy Laboratory and the founding Director of the Synthetic Fuels Center. He returned to personal research in 1988, concentrating on transportation fuels and biofuels, and their environmental effects. In 1948 he married Carol Hirschon Weiss, who died in January 2013. He is survived by his three children, Janet, Daniel, and Judith, and four grandchildren, Benjamin, Samuel, Jacob, and Delilah. In lieu of flowers, donations in his memory may be made to the Boston Public Library Foundation (bplf.org).