Founding dean of VCU School of Engineering elected to the Georgia Tech Hall of Fame

The Georgia Tech College of Engineering has inducted Henry A. McGee Jr., Ph.D., founding dean of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Engineering, into its Hall of Fame.

The college honored McGee this month for his sustained and meritorious contributions to the field of engineering.

“To the extent that I have enjoyed a measure of success in engineering education and practice, it has been largely due to the high quality of doctoral students and colleagues with whom I have worked over the years,” McGee said.

As founding dean of the VCU School of Engineering, McGee led the design and implementation of a nontraditional school that accepted its first freshmen in1996. The school recently celebrated its 10th anniversary with a reception attended by university officials, trustees, faculty and alumni. He retired from VCU in 1999.

McGee received his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in chemical engineering from Georgia Tech and undertook a post-doctoral appointment in theoretical chemistry at the University of Wisconsin. He pursued research on exotic high energy fuels for propulsion in space at the Army Missile Command and at NASA. In addition, he served on the faculty at Georgia Tech, and was head of Virginia Tech’s Department of Chemical Engineering.

His research grants on projects at the intersection of chemical engineering and physical chemistry led to the 1991 textbook “Molecular Engineering.” As a division director at the National Science Foundation, he designed and implemented the first federally supported program of research on environmentally conscious chemical processing, an area of the discipline now called “green engineering.”