Fred Shair, Founder of Caltech's SURF Program, Has Passed Away

Former Caltech professor Fred Shair, who founded Caltech's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program in 1979, died January 16. He was 88 years old.

Shair was professor of chemical engineering at Caltech when he founded the SURF program. He moved to Cal State Long Beach in 1989, where he was dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Then, in the mid-1990s, Shair served as the manager of the educational affairs office at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, and continued to consult for Caltech's SURF program through the 2000s.

In an oral history interview for the Caltech Heritage Project in 2022, Shair recalled that in the 1970s, he and some of his colleagues were experiencing funding cuts in grants from the National Science Foundation. Hearing their worry that they would be unable to fund graduate students got Shair thinking about how Caltech might increase opportunities for students, including undergraduate students who could work in labs over the summer. "When I tried to get it started at Caltech, not too many people were interested," Shair remembered. "They said, 'Research is experience. They need to know the fundamentals, then they can do research.' Well, Feynman disagreed. … The moment that happened, and [Feynman] took a student on, the rest of the faculty said, 'I'm ready for that, too, Fred.'" And in this way, the SURF program was launched.

Shair was characteristically modest about his efforts in founding SURF. "The irony was that way back when, when Caltech was first started, there were some [undergraduates] doing research, but that sort of dwindled and stopped," Shair said. "But there were some old-timers who would come to me and say, 'We did something similar to this way back in 1922.' But I was lucky to be at the right place at the right time and had really good people around me."

Today Shair's brainchild—SURF—has expanded to a range of summer programs that extend research opportunities to students not only from Caltech but from many other colleges and universities. Candace Rypisi, assistant vice provost and the director of student–faculty programs at Caltech, remembers Shair as creative, energetic, and tenacious. "Fred loved mentoring young scholars and was always trying to connect students with potential mentors and projects," Rypisi says.

Born in Denver, Shair grew up in a small town in Illinois. He had no intention of pursuing an education beyond high school, but he scored well on a test and was invited to attend, on a full scholarship, the University of Illinois, from which he earned a BS in 1957. Later, one of his professors at the University of Illinois encouraged Shair to talk with a representative from UC Berkeley, and the result was another full scholarship, this time to attend graduate school. As Shair told the story, "I went out to Berkeley, and it was the best thing I did. It was the first time I'd ever been in an airplane." He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1963.

While at UC Berkeley, Shair began studying fluid motions in the atmosphere, developing tracers to track industrial emissions, among other chemicals. He continued this pursuit first at General Electric and then at Caltech, creating measurement techniques that were many times more precise than those previously available. Shair's methods allowed him to document how emissions in Los Angeles left factories and traveled out to sea, only to return to the LA Basin in the evening; they also could track chemicals in Earth's atmosphere journeying from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere. Shair's research, teaching, and administrative work led to commendations from the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the Caltech Alumni Association, and the National Academy of Sciences.

He is survived by his wife, Constance Shair, three children, and six grandchildren.