Mitsuzo Shida’s legacy at the school of engineering
Mitsuzo Shida (’64) was born in 1935 in Hamamatsu, Japan, and earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from Kyoto University. After earning his master’s in 1959, he was given the opportunity to study at Brooklyn Poly’s Polymer Research Institute. (Brooklyn Poly is now NYU Tandon School of Engineering.) The Institute had been founded by pioneering chemist Herman Mark in 1948 and had become, by 1960, the global epicenter for the study of macromolecules or polymers. (Polymers are made of giant molecules formed by uniting simple molecules, or monomers, by covalent bonds. They have high molecular weights, which give them useful characteristics such as high viscosity, elasticity, and great strength, rendering them invaluable in the development of countless innovative products.)
Dr. Shida earned his Ph.D. at the Institute and accepted a post at W.R. Grace, a major chemical company. He subsequently joined Chemplex, a startup trying to gain a foothold in polymer products (then still considered to be a new frontier in consumer science), where he worked with polyolefins, now the most widely used plastics in the world. In 1996 he launched his own company, Soarus, which grew into a multinational supplier of specialty resin products before being acquired in 2016. Dr. Shida ultimately earned more than 50 patents over the course of his career, including several for polymer-based packaging materials and adhesives that remain in widespread use today.
Dr. Shida always asserted that if researchers were provided with a conducive environment in which to pursue topics that they felt passionate about, anything was possible. The Polymer Research Institute provided just such an environment, enabling him to forge a long career and make transformative advancements in polymer-based manufacturing. In his honor, the Shida family recently made a generous gift to the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, which will fund critical research initiatives within the department.
“The Shida family’s gift comes at a transformative time for Tandon as we build on NYU’s formidable achievements in science and technology to shape the engineering school of the future,” said Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology and NYU Tandon’s Executive Dean Juan de Pablo. “Their generosity will help us fuel research projects conducted by our chemical engineering Ph.D. students seeking to address the great challenges of our time in climate science and engineering, energy production, and other vital aspects of modern life."
