Bob* Street – A Man for All Seasons

Robert Lynwood Street, the William Alden and Martha Campbell Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, has probably held more positions and taken on more roles than any other faculty member in Stanford history. While it may be difficult to verify this assertion, it is hard to imagine anyone serving the university in the many diverse ways Bob* did from 1962, when he joined the faculty, to 2005, when he retired from active service.

Bob was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and migrated to East Beverly Hills, California, with his parents as a young child. His father, who was from San Francisco, and his mother, a native of Brisbane, Australia, met in Honolulu before WWII and moved to the mainland in December 1940. Bob attended Beverly Hills High, where he was a great student but (by his own admission) a mediocre football player. He was accepted to Stanford in 1952, where he participated in the ROTC program. Because Stanford would not accept the ROTC course credit he had accumulated toward his BS degree in Civil Engineering, Bob simply bypassed the formalities of a BS degree and went straight to the MS CE degree, which he was awarded in 1957 in the subfield of hydraulics. So, if you should ever ask Bob why he signs his email as “Bob*” he will tell you the asterisk denotes “no-BS” – which in this case is true for a number of reasons. After earning his MS CE, Bob joined the US Navy Construction Battalion (“The Seabees”), where he received an officer’s commission and gained enormous experience in managing projects and people. Having completed his Navy obligation in 1960, Bob came back to Stanford to pursue a PhD in Civil Engineering with Professor Byrne Perry. Supported on an NSF Graduate Fellowship and doing computations of cavitating hydrofoils, Bob thus began his incredible research career in fluid mechanics and applied mathematics.

While Bob was finishing his PhD in 1962 and contemplating his next career move, his advisor, Byrne Perry, decided to move to Hawaii. Bob was offered a job on the Stanford faculty by then CEE Executive Head Ray Linsley, who clearly knew exactly what he was doing in snagging the enormous talents of “Dr.” Street! Not only did Linsley offer Bob a job as acting assistant professor (he had to wait until his degree was formally conferred in 1963 to be made an official assistant professor), but he also asked Bob to serve as assistant executive head for the department. Thus began the faculty career of this true Man for All Seasons – a stellar researcher, an inspiring teacher, and an unparalleled academic administrator.

Bob spent the majority of his research career working on “computational problems,” although he started out as a “self-confessed” experimentalist. Over the 43 years of his active faculty career, and in the subsequent 20 or so years, Bob has worked on a wide variety of problems, beginning with his work on cavitating airfoils. He worked on problems related to surface and internal waves in the ocean, flow of groundwater and pollutants in the subsurface environment, wind-driven flow in large water bodies such as estuaries and the near-coastal ocean, shear-driven and convectively driven cavity flows, atmospheric flows, and the transport of atmospheric pollution, among others. The presence of turbulence in the flow was a constant across all of these domains (except, of course, for the subsurface flows!). In addition, two other constant themes were present in all of this work. The first was Bob’s keen interest in developing accurate and efficient numerical methods for solving the Navier-Stokes and transport equations. The second was a lifelong quest to develop the ultimate turbulence model! Bob still works on these issues to this day. Together with Milovan Peric he continues to update the book Computational Methods for Fluid Dynamics, originally written by Peric and our late colleague in Mechanical Engineering, Joel Ferziger.

In recognition of his incredible research contributions, Bob has received a number of honors, including election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Award, and becoming a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2012, the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory at Stanford was renamed the Bob and Norma Street Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory in honor of Bob and his wife, Norma. (The picture of Bob at the top of this piece was taken at the celebration to mark the dedication of the laboratory.)

Over the course of his career, Bob advised or co-advised 50 PhD students. Bob has always been a firm believer in what Jim Gibbons (former Dean of Engineering) called the Golden Triangle of Research: a faculty member, a student, a problem. Those of us who were privileged to work with him in this way came to admire and appreciate his ability to allow enough space for a student to develop his or her own creativity while still ensuring that things moved forward, and that help was near when needed. Bob also impressed on us the need to be kind, understanding, and respectful in our interactions with our own students. Many of Bob’s students went on to very successful careers in academia at institutions such as Berkeley, Texas, Davis, Illinois, and Stanford, and undoubtedly all carried those important lessons with them in conducting their own careers.

Although Bob had to reduce his teaching greatly in service of his administrative roles over the years, he was always a truly inspiring and creative teacher. His approach was to challenge the students, so the homework sets in his courses were famous for being challenging and demanding. That said, Bob was always there to help, even when you felt you had been thrown “into a dark cave,” as he put it. In the 1977-78 academic year, the LOTS computer system came online at Stanford and Bob used it extensively in his modeling course. LOTS was completely overwhelmed by the number of users, and it was slow and often difficult to gain access. Yet many were the nights when Bob was there at 1am in the LOTS terminal room in the old Terman Engineering Center (in his tracksuit!), sitting with his students and helping to debug their computer codes. Such was his dedication to his craft. Bob also contributed greatly to the education of many students at Stanford and beyond through his authorship of books on fluid mechanics, applied mathematics, and computational methods. Of all these books, perhaps the most influential has been Elementary Fluid Mechanics. Bob “inherited” the authorship of this book from John Vennard, a beloved teacher of fluid mechanics at Stanford, and subsequently added his former student Gary Watters to the author list.

Over the course of his 43-year career at Stanford, Bob was a much sought-out academic administrator and he was appointed to the following positions in addition to his faculty role: Assistant and Associate Executive Head of the CEE Department; Chair of the CEE Department; Acting Dean of the School of Engineering; Senior Associate Dean for Research in the School of Engineering; Vice-Provost and Dean of Research for the university; Acting Provost; Vice-Provost for Academic Computing and Information Systems; Vice-Provost for Libraries and Information Resources. The latter two positions are particularly noteworthy because they were essentially created to take advantage of Bob’s knowledge as well as his considerable skills in managing complex systems, particularly when it came to things computational. Just for good measure, Bob also served as the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) for four years.

To illustrate his prowess in academic administration, one only needs to turn back the clock to the arrival of personal computers “en masse” on campus in the early ’80s. In 1983 Bob was asked to become the first Vice-Provost for Academic Computing and Information Systems. The task was formidable! How would Stanford continue to provide large-scale research computing to its faculty and students, support the burgeoning demands of academic computing, and integrate the emerging personal computer world into its research, teaching, and administrative functions? Bob had to create a whole new organization from essentially the ground up while keeping abreast of a computational world that was evolving at seemingly warp speed. Those of us who were beginning our academic careers then benefited enormously from Bob’s great wisdom and insights, and his ability to bring enormous computational resources from Apple, IBM, and others into our academic lives. It was an amazing time.

Bob is now 90 years young. He was married to his high-school sweetheart Norma for 64 years (they knew each other for 72 years) before she sadly passed on a few years ago. Norma was a legend herself as a longtime administrator at Gunn High School in Palo Alto. Bob has two children (Debbie and Kim) with Norma, and he lives in a retirement community not far from campus. He still comes to campus from time to time to listen in on seminars, and occasionally to give one, and remains connected to many of his former students. He is currently planning a trip to Croatia with his daughter Kim.

This tribute was written with great love and respect by Jeff Koseff who to this day is enormously grateful to Bob* for taking him on as a PhD student! All inaccuracies and errors are the author’s alone.