Memorial held for Professor John Chato

John Chato

In late June, colleagues, friends, and former students gathered to hold a memorial session for John Chato at the ASME Summer Bioengineering Conference in Farmington, Pennsylvania. They reminisced and noted his pioneering work and notable contributions, particularly in the bio-technology area.

Chato was a professor of Mechanical, Biological, and Nuclear Engineering at the University of Illinois from 1964 until retiring in 1996. After his retirement, he remained active around campus as an emeritus professor until his death late last year.

“I can’t say enough good things about him,” said Emad Jassim, noting Chato had advised him from his master’s thesis in 2001 through his Ph.D. work. “He was basically a professor emeritus retired, and I would see him come into the lab. I would have problems with my research, and I would sit down and talk with him, and he would give me very good direction even though he had not been working with these things for a while. He was still very sharp, all the way to the end. He always had curiosity.”

Chato was very active as a leader within the bioheat transfer community, providing mentoring for generations of younger professionals. He organized a series of five meetings on bioheat transfer at Allerton House over a period of 25 years that had a profound influence on advancing the discipline and in guiding the careers of many investigators in the field.

Chato earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati, where he met his wife of 56 years, Beth Owens. He added a Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Math from M.I.T.

Some of Chato’s colleagues and friends shared their thoughts for the memorial, several of which are reprinted here:

I remember John Chato as an unassuming, thoughtful, competent colleague with whom I spent some enjoyable times. I first met John at the second Allerton Conference on biomedical engineering at the University of Illinois. Those conferences organized by John and supported in part by the National Science Foundation brought together a group of scientists and engineers who shared a common interest in human thermal physiology. The setting at the Allerton Estate along a small river near Urbana was an ideal place to hold such a meeting. John also organized a third conference which I was privileged to attend. After I retired from active teaching, John and I shared a room at the ASME meeting in Orlando in 1996. He chaired a session where I presented a paper in which Pennes’ inappropriate analysis of data from subjects with different sized forearms was discussed. I think John was a little put out that I didn’t tell him beforehand what I planned to say, because there was considerable interest at the time in the lack of agreement between temperature profiles computed using the Pennes model and the mean experimentally defined profile, but he didn’t hold my deceit against me. Later John became involved with a retired faculty group at Illinois. Since I had just finished a term as President of a similar group at Texas, John invited me to tell a luncheon group about our experience. I stayed with him and Beth and had a delightful time. We visited a bird sanctuary near their home and John pointed out different bird calls as we walked through the area. I also remember that he had a Folboat hanging overhead in his garage, which tells you something about his enjoyment of the important things of life. John was truly a fine person. Engineering education in general, and biomedical engineering in particular, benefited greatly from his contributions, and he will be missed. --Gene Wissler

My one and only meeting with Prof. Chato was at the 1998 ASME meeting in Anaheim. I had the good fortune of being seated next to him at the K-17 dinner and I still remember his paroxysmal coughing and his kind and caring personality. –Ram Devireddy

John Chato was more than a tennis player; he was also a wonderful host. He made everyone feel welcome immediately. The 1997 Allerton Conference on Biotransport Phenomenon was my first conference in the field of heat and mass transfer applied to living systems and I knew no one in the field. Arriving in Champaign-Urbana, I had hardly stepped off of the plane before John had a couple of us on a tennis court. John didn’t have time to play, having so many other hosting duties to look after, but he took the time to make sure that those he knew and those he had just met felt warmly welcome. This attention to the comfort of the conference attendees continued throughout the weekend. This made the Allerton Conference a wonderful experience, bringing together students and early career researchers with the most prominent senior researchers in the field. The close-knit nature of the Biotransport community again was found at the Biotransport ’98 Symposium: Heat and Mass Transfer In Living Systems chaired by Ken Diller in Kusadasi, Turkey. The collegiality of the community was shown here on an international stage. Again, the science was considered in a rigorous, but supportive, manner. And this time, John’s influence on the tennis court played a bigger role as we fought the winds coming in from the Aegean Sea. John, of course, had interests in other than playing tennis. He enjoyed heat transfer, as well. He applied heat transfer engineering principles to many then novel applications. His early contributions to two-phase flow made him, in the early 1960’s, the right researcher at the right place and right time to develop cryogenic probe for neurosurgery and advance research in the treatment of cerebral palsy. He continued to apply the engineering perspective to different aspects of biomedical research. I got to know John later in his career, sometime between a couple of his several retirements. He still took take great joy in answering serious questions in creative and often enjoyable ways. The question of how long one can remain in a hot tub without undue risk required some analysis. More importantly, it required bringing together some friends to run an experiment. Alas, while not part of the experimental cohort, I’ve since heeded his advice: about 15 minutes whether big or small. He also reasoned that heating could cure onychomycosis (toenail fungus) without expensive and potentially harmful drugs and used himself to test this hypothesis. We’ve since shown in the laboratory that tricophtum rubrum is indeed more heat sensitive than is skin, supporting John’s findings. Some lawyers have patented this therapy, kind of. But how does one patent a hot bath? Sometimes a simple solution can be best, if one has the insight to see it. Whether he was reminding me that there are valuable research results that are documented in journals that have yet to be cataloged in computer databases, or that it is important to have fun and joy in research, I will be forever grateful to Professor Chato for his friendship and advice. –Neil Wright

Few receive or more richly deserve the tributes coming to John Chato at this Memorial Symposium.
I met John at one of the early Allerton Conferences. We had similar interests and hit it off quite well. I suspect that Ave Shitzer's spending a Visiting Professorship at UT Southwestern (late 70's-early 80's) may have been influenced by John. Much creative work ensued. John strongly encouraged Ave and me to develop the book "Heat Transfer in Medicine and Biology" during this period, and (I again suspect) lobbied others to contribute chapters. He himself generously contributed a chapter on measurement of thermal properties of biological materials (an early look at biotransport), a chapter co-written with Ave on garment heat transfer, and a useful appendix of transport properties of biological materials. I would see John from time to time thereafter, including a very pleasant interlude with him and his wife in Dallas, on one of their famous birding expositions. Especially remembered is a wonderful reunion in Haifa that brought John and me together with Ave, at Ave's invitation. There it was learned that Ave and a Palestinian grad student (name forgotten) had shared time together in John's lab in Illinois. That student was then on the faculty at Nablus University, in the West Bank. At John's urging a telephone call was made, and a polite three way conversation ensued between the three (about old times, and the NASA garments that they had worked on). Unfortunately, despite Ave and John's efforts, the collegial atmosphere that had existed in America could not be later duplicated in the Middle East. John Chato has deservedly earned the respect and affection of so many workers in the Biotransport field. My own activity was very positively influenced by John. This Symposium is evidence of the broad, deep, positive impact this talented and inspired man has had on our field and our lives. –Robert Eberhart

I can remember vividly first meeting John: 1972, when he rescued me from a most trying situation. As a young, freshly minted Ph.D., I was giving the first professional talk of my life at the 1972 ASME Winter Annual Meeting in New York. The talk described a new mathematical model of the human temperature regulatory system, a model I was most proud of since it predicted quite well several simultaneously occurring physiological responses to step changes in the ambient temperatures. During the question and answer period a questioner stood up, but instead of asking a technical question, went into a passionate speech about how all phenomena in life were transient and oscillatory, and how modeling responses that reached a steady state condition following a step function was a total waste of time, and how the group I worked with was just part of an even larger group of misdirected “steady staters,” and none of us knew what we were doing, me included. I was immediately transformed into a panicked deer in the headlights, frozen in place, speechless — until a kind stranger in the audience rescued me by providing a response (the content of which I have no idea about since I remained in shock). When the meeting adjourned, I met my savior, John Chato! After that, I had a hero, whom I will always remember for the great kindnesses he extended to me then, and later, including inviting me to be a co-speaker with him at a meeting of the French ASME equivalent, and when he and Beth honored my wife and I by staying with us during a birding trip to Tucson. We think of them regularly every time we look at the Gambel’s quail trivets they gave us a gift, and I will never forget this influential, kind and generous man. –Robert Roemer

John Chato always seemed to enjoy work and enjoy life. I particularly liked his practical approach to engineering. One of my favorite memories of him is the article he wrote on how to cure toe-nail fungus with hot water. He determined the required temperature and time history to kill the fungus without harming the underlying tissue. It was not elegant but it served a useful function. John also did a lot of heat transfer research in areas outside of biomedical. I tell my students one of his stories about his experience in graduate school at MIT with Warren Rohsenow. He worked on condensation inside of tubes. As part of this he published a correlation for the heat transfer coefficient and the modified latent heat to account for the effect of the sensible heat of the liquid for internal condensation. One year while waiting in line to register at an ASME conference, I asked John why the equation for the modified latent heat was different for internal flow versus external flow. His answer was that the external flow case was solved in great detail, which they decided to not repeat for the internal case. It normally wasn’t a large effect anyway, so it wasn’t practical to spend the time and effort to derive it. So they used the simple approximation. He presumed that the more complete answer would be close to the external case. Most people don’t know that twenty-five years ago we tried to convince John to be our department head. Looking back on it, I think he made the right choice to eventually turn us down. Although Blacksburg is a nice place, I think he had the best opportunity to
enjoy life continuing as a faculty at Illinois -- and I trust that he did most enjoy that. —Tom Diller

I am sorry I can’t join all of you at this special occasion honoring John Chato. John is in my mind the “modern father of bioheat transfer”. Though I am no longer active in this field and do much of my present research in cellular biomechanics, I did spend two decades of my life in bioheat transfer and this would never have happened were it not for John. Few of you know the circumstances of how this happened. In the fall of 1982 John had been invited by Rakesh Jain to give a seminar at Columbia University. Most investigators in the field had been using the Pennes bioheat equation for the past four decades and Pennes himself had done his classical studies in thermal physiology at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. Rakesh called me up and strongly suggested that I attend the lecture since he didn’t understand how thermal equilibration could occur in capillaries when the thermal diffusivity of tissues was 1000 times as large as oxygen diffusivity. John’s seminar stressed simple illustrative models of thermal equilibration in blood vessels which clearly indicated that blood had to equilibrate with tissue long before the capillaries were reached. His presentation was very convincing. The next day I approached my heat transfer colleague, Latif Jiji, and together we went over to the thermal physiology laboratory of Larry Crawshaw at Columbia P & S and asked if he could make the first fine wire thermocouple measurements of the temperature surrounding microvessels that were 50 μm or larger. This project became the PhD thesis of Dan Lemons and the rest is now history. The measurements clearly showed that heat transfer occurred primarily in blood vessels between 100 and 500 μm, and not capillaries, and these vessels nearly always occurred as countercurrent pairs. John was a very generous individual and an inspiration to many of the younger investigators in the field including many who are sitting here today. The Allerton Conferences that he organized were the nucleus for research activity in bioheat transfer and a must for all who were working in the area. I join you in celebrating his many achievements and the many students of bioheat transfer who he has trained. He richly deserves to be remembered by the entire biomechanics community. –Shelly Weinbaum

In my mind, John Chato was the Dean of the field of Bioheat Transfer since I entered the field and he will stay the Dean in my heart for as long as I live. I am proud that my academic lineage comes from John Chato through Professor Avraham Shitzer, my MSc thesis advisor at the Technion. As every young Assistant Professor knows, the established denizens of the field are intimidating, in particular when all you know about them are their papers and the fact that they hold your future in their hands by having the ability to reject your papers and proposals. Having come from Holocaust survivors and having spend my childhood in the darkness of totalitarian communism, confidence and trust in people were never my
strong point. Before meeting John Chato, I was very apprehensive of him. What a surprise it was to find out when I first met him, that he is such a genuinely nice person. It turns out that we were actually neighbors in the old country – and I even tried my limited vocabulary in Hungarian on him. I learned that he has also run away from the communists. However, the most important think that I have learned in our first meeting was that he is really, deeply an outstanding good human being – and this conclusion has never left me and the years I knew John only made this conviction deeper. As a scientist John Chato has exceled in his research. I believe that every textbook and review in bioheat transfer cites from his work. However, most unique to such a great scientist was his care for the entire field and the people in the field. Attending the Allerton meetings that he would organize was a unique opportunity for me. These meeting were probably the most important source of learning the field for me and their memory will always stay with me. Thank you John. As time went by, I had the opportunity to meet John many times, during scientific conferences and visits to other Universities. It was always a joy to meet John and to be immersed in the sense of good and kindness, which always surrounded John and Beth when they were together. I cannot understand where this profound good that surrounded them came – but I have never seen a couple that seemed so perfect together and so content in being together. John was a great scientist, but most important – he was a very good man. May he look from Heaven upon this meeting with a smile. –Boris Rubinsky