Merrill Ebner; pioneered product engineering at BU
Not long before helping to launch a new area of engineering study at Boston University, Merrill L. Ebner worked at Edwards Air Force Base in California, learning firsthand that even the best mechanical designs for jets sometimes fail.
"Many of them were untried and still in the experimental process, and many crashed," he told BU College of Engineering magazine in fall 2006. "My job was to piece them back together and figure out why they fell down from the sky. It was quite an experience. Every two weeks there was a crash."
A half-century later, he was still piecing things together, though instead of rummaging through debris, he used cutting-edge technology to expand avenues for learning at the university where he spent nearly all his professional life. While attending a BU recognition dinner March 27, at which he was to be honored, Dr. Ebner suffered a heart attack and died a short time later. He was 76.
Officially easing into professor emeritus status this year, Dr. Ebner was never the retiring type.
"Instead of going to work six days a week, he was going to go in five days a week," said his son, Merrill Jr. of West Hartford, Conn.
"The university was another family for him," John Ebner of Portland, Ore., said of his father, who joined the BU faculty in 1964. "He looked at his graduate students in a similar way, metaphorically, that others would look at their children."
Dr. Ebner was a professor and administrator during four decades of enormous and rapid changes in engineering, as students went from slide rules to supercomputers. He incorporated much of what was new into his teaching as he helped shape BU's College of Engineering and create the new department of manufacturing engineering.
"One of the things that was really amazing about him was that he had this wonderful knack of looking at technology and understanding how it would best work in helping him do his job as a teacher," his son said.
A dozen years ago, Dr. Ebner began heading the engineering college's distance learning program. Of late he had used computer software that combines video and instant messages in ways that let students attend lab courses from home.
"Merrill was an icon," Kenneth R. Lutchen, dean of the college of engineering, said in a statement. "The Boston University College of Engineering would not be where it is today without his numerous and enduring contributions."
John Silber, president emeritus of BU, told the engineering magazine two years ago for the article on Dr. Ebner that "the elevated stature of the College of Engineering today is a result in significant degree from his contributions."
Were it not for his love of science, Dr. Ebner might have stayed in the rolling hills near Pullman, Wash., the Palouse Country in the eastern part of the state.
"He grew up on the farm, tending the wheat fields in the summertime," said his daughter, Martha of Northampton. "I think he was a farmer at heart, and I think that had a deep impact on who he was and it never really left him."
Moving east to attend MIT on an ROTC scholarship, he found an intellectual home on both sides of the Charles River. He received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1953, a master's the following year, and a doctorate in materials science and engineering in 1958.
Meanwhile, he ventured into Boston to take classes at the Museum School, where he indulged a talent for sculpting.
"It's not a big stretch from designing products to other shapes," he told BU's engineering magazine in 2006.
After his work with the Air Force, Dr. Ebner returned for postdoctoral work at MIT, where a few years earlier he had met June Belleza. They married in 1956.
Boston University recruited him in 1964 shortly after the school renamed its College of Industrial Technology, calling it the College of Engineering. Dr. Ebner set about creating a new discipline, manufacturing engineering, focusing on the design and development of products.
The program was accredited several years later, and BU says that in 1989 it became the first university in the United States to award a doctorate in manufacturing engineering.
Richard Dorf, who had taken classes from Dr. Ebner and later became an executive for technology companies, established the Merrill L. Ebner Fund in 2003 to support programs for students and encourage creative design in manufacturing engineering.
"He loves his work so much, maybe he doesn't think of it as work," Dorf told the BU engineering magazine, "and that's inspiring."
That affection, John Ebner said, extended beyond embracing the duties of teaching and running academic programs.
"He was a man who really valued the people around him," he said of his father. "He knew all the janitors on a first-name basis. He knew all the administrative staff."
And he also knew how to measure how far and how fast his field had progressed.
"I found a slide rule in his dresser drawer just this morning; I remember playing with it as a kid," John Ebner said yesterday, speaking from his parents' home in Arlington. "He went to college in the 1950s, and slide rules and pencil and paper were what you got. By the end, he was graduating students who were working with supercomputers. He loved technology, and he just rode it like a surfer rides a wave."
In addition to his wife, two sons, and daughter, Dr. Ebner leaves another son, Karl of Waltham; a brother, Ford of Nashville; and six grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. today in St. John's Episcopal Church in Arlington. Burial will be in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. 