RUSTUM ROY

VITA

Rustum Roy cannot be described by any professional label.  He has interwoven throughout his 60 year career both world-class science and active participation in reforming theology and the practice of religion.  He is at once a distinguished research scientist and a social activist, a societal reformer and a champion of whole person healing (or CAM). He currently holds professorships at Penn State, Arizona State and the University of Arizona covering those fields.

His work has been recognized by his election to five separate National Academies of Engineering/Science: of the U.S., Sweden, India, Japan, and Russia. He has had the Order of the Rising Sun with Gold Rays conferred on him by the Emperor of Japan.

One of the key founders of the first major interdisciplinary field in the Western world’s academia—Materials Research—he led Penn State’s Materials Research Lab, which he directed for 23 years, to its recognition in 2003 by ISI as the world’s #1 lab in the field. He played the same role for the field of Science, Technology & Society, specializing in Science Policy, Science Education, and Science and Religion. He had been involved—usually as the only scientist—with the cutting edge reform of the Church, serving on key committees of the National Council of Churches while an active participant in shaping the Retreat and the house church movements. He gave the prestigious Hibbert Lectures in London and served on the Pope’s Nova Spes committee on Science and Religion—a field on which he has written and lectured for 50 years.

 Chemical Engineering News—one of the world’s most widely circulated scientific society journals has said of him, “It is extremely unlikely that the scientific world will soon again see a person functioning on the broadband scale of a Leo Szilard.  Today’s closest approximation to Szilard may be materials scientist Rustum Roy of Pennsylvania State University.  The two share the kind of human energy, moral vision, and futuristic leaps that most scientists do not seem keen to summon, and thus dismiss.” Newsweek called him the “leading contrarian among scientists.”