John Wenzel, Professor of Glass Science

Professor John (Jack) Wenzel

Materials Science and Engineering Department
Rutgers University
607 Taylor Road
Piscataway, NJ 08854-8065

Telephone:    848-445-5092
Mobile:          908-239-2131
Facsimile:      732-445-3258
wenzel@soe.rutgers.edu

Biography

Dr John T (Jack) Wenzel is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey. He has held prior positions at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Washington, DC, and at Saint-Gobain in Paris, France. Dr Wenzel is an expert in glass technology and is the author of the glass entry in the McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology.

Dr Wenzel started his career with postdoctoral Fellowships at the Danish Atomic Energy Commission (Roskilde) and in England at AERE Harwell (Oxford) and the University of Kent at Canterbury.

At NIST he was a member of the Inorganic Glass Section, where he discovered new optical glasses for high-power lasers, studied glass vaporization and melt thermochemistry, and developed glass viscosity Standard Reference Materials.

Dr Wenzel was Corporate Director of Research at Saint-Gobain, a Fortune 100 materials company with products in glass, iron and steel, refractories, high-performance materials, plastics, and paper. He was a fortituitous actor in the nationalization of Saint-Gobain by the French Socialist Government in 1983, for the third time in the company's 350-year history. (The company was re-privatized in 1987).

At Rutgers Dr Wenzel has been Director of the Center for Plastics Recycling and Associate Director of the Institute for Engineered Materials.  He is currently the Undergraduate Director in the MS&E Department and advises sixty students on their courses and careers. He has taught most courses in the Department, and in the School of Engineering he has taught computer programming to freshman engineers. His courses receive high student evaluations.

Dr Wenzel earned his B.S. degree in Mathematics from Stanford University, where he played trumpet in the irreverent LSJU Marching Band and conducted research in chemistry under Henry Taube (Nobel Prize,1983); he later earned his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the University of Chicago. He received the IR-100 Award for the development of new laser glasses, and is a Fellow of both the American Ceramic Society and the prestigious British Society of Glass Technology. In 1996-7 Dr Wenzel was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship at the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, in 2001 he was admitted as a Reader at the British Library, King's Cross, London to study ancient glass, and in 2003-4 he was named a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's Materials Institute.

Dr Wenzel was President of the 18th International Congress on Glass in 1998 in San Francisco, California. This Congress was praised for its smooth functioning and innovative management (proper balance of countries' interests; international teleconferencing to organize; first ACerS Congress to mount a website and issue Proceedings electronically; application of glass science to archeology and museum conservation) and it set records for attendance, number of countries represented, and the high-quality of invited papers.

Dr Wenzel has been has been an officer of the American Ceramic Society and the US delegate to the International Commission on Glass, and was the founder and vice-chair of its Technical Committee 23 on Education and Training. He has also been an officer of the British Society of Glass Technology, and he founded and served as first president of its North American Section. In 2009 he was elected President of the Ceramic Association of New Jersey.

Since Y2K Dr Wenzel has been President of the Princeton Macintosh Users' Group, a premier and creative computer club which has won national awards for its newsletter and exhibitions. In summer 2000 he volunteered (with PMUG, Apple Computer, the Department of State, and the International Red Cross) to help Kosovo refugees use computers and the internet in a computer trailer during their stay at Fort Dix, NJ; in 2004 and again in 2007 he was named Macintosh Man of the Year for the tri-State region. He is also a beta-tester for Macintosh virtualization software.

In 2003 Dr Wenzel was president the New Jersey Fulbright Assocation, and he currently serves on its Board; in 2005-9 he was Chair of the Teacher Exchange Program, which interviewed New Jersey K-12 teachers for Fulbright exchanges.

Since 2006 he has been an academic representative to the editorial focus group of the Wall Street Journal.

Dr Wenzel has translated technical, financial, and literary documents into Spanish, French and English. Notable translations were Annual Reports of Saint-Gobain (R&D portion), and a condolence note from the CEO of Saint-Gobain to Pilkington Bros. on the passing of the father of Sir Alistair Pilkington, inventor of the float glass process.

Dr Wenzel's hobbies include music, art, ballroom dancing, walking and hiking, canoeing and kayaking, and tennis. In Washington he was chess champion of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and he is now faculty advisor to the Rutgers Chess Club; in France he played trumpet in the Saint Leu Brass Quartet near Wanda Landowska's house; and at Rutgers he is a member of the Ballroom Dance Team. He has written and sung Gregorian chants in music theory classes. He particularly appreciates Rodin sculptures (Philadelphia, New York, Washington, and Paris), Degas miniature sculptures of dancers, and oil paintings by Chaim Soutine at the Barnes Foundation and the Princeton Art Museum.

 

Updated:  October 2019