Sheldon Weinbaum

Weinbaum has been instrumental in the development of the biomedical engineering program at The City College of New York and CUNY. In 1994 he and Stephen C. Cowin established the New York Center for Biomedical Engineering and in 1999 they introduced the new CUNY PhD program in Biomedical Engineering. This led to the creation of the Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2002 and an undergraduate degree program in this field.

His 1992 class-action lawsuit Weinbaum vs. Cuomo (lead article Metro Section of the New York Times) brought national attention to the alleged racially discriminatory funding of higher education in New York State. The initial positive ruling was overturned on the New York State Court of Appeals in 1996 on the grounds that the state did not have to fund its two university systems CUNY and SUNY equally provided neither university had racially biased admissions. Weinbaum then turned his attention to encouraging high achieving underrepresented minority (URM) students to go to graduate school and pursue a PhD in a series of grants from the Sloan Foundation and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at NIH 1997–2013. The success of the latter program is described by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Kenneth Cooper in “Diverse Issues in Higher Education”. In 2020 Weinbaum received the PAESMEM Award from the White House for his excellence in mentoring of underrepresented minority students.

Weinbaum is recognized as a pioneering advocate for women and minorities in science and engineering. As an untenured professor he was almost fired in 1969 for his role in supporting Black and Hispanic students in their takeover of the City College campus in their protest against existing admission policies. In 1977 he established the first summer outreach program at The City College for low income public high school students in science and engineering. In 1988 he received the Public Service Award of the Fund for the City of New York from Mayor Edward Koch for his role in recruiting women and minority faculty and students to the Grove School of Engineering.

Sheldon Weinbaum: (born July 26, 1937 in Brooklyn, New York, United States) is an American biomedical engineer and biofluid mechanician. He is a CUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering at The City College of New York. He is a member of all three U.S. national academies (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine) and also the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2002 when he was elected to NAM he became the sixth living individual to be a member of all three National Academies and the first to achieve this disrtinction since 1992. He was the founding director (1994–1999) of the New York Center for Biomedical Engineering, a regional research consortium involving the BME program at The City College and eight of the premier health care institutions in New York City. He has been a lifelong advocate for women and minorities in science and engineering. He was the lead plaintiff and organizer of a class-action lawsuit (Weinbaum vs. Cuomo) charging New York State officials with racially discriminatory funding of its two university systems, CUNY and SUNY, the first CUNY faculty recipient of the Public Service Award of the Fund for the City of New York, and the Inaugural Recipient of the “Diversity Award” of the Biomedical Engineering Society (2009). He was the inaugural chair of the Selection Committee that chooses the annual Sloan Awardees for the outstanding math and science teachers in the New York City public high schools and served in this position from 2009 to 2019. In 2022 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Biomedical Engineerings from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Weinbaum was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His parents are Alex Weinbaum, who emigrated to the U.S. from Russia in 1921, and Frances (Stark) Weinbaum. He attended Jamaica High School, Queens, and Abraham Lincoln High School, Brooklyn, and received his bachelor's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Aeronautical Engineering in 1959. He earned his MS in Applied Physics 1960 and his PhD in Engineering 1963 from Harvard University where he was a Gordon McKay Prize and then National Science Foundation Fellow. His dissertation is titled “Natural convection phenomena in horizontal circular cylinders” and completed under the direction of George F. Carrier. He subsequently worked for the Avco Everett Research Laboratory and the General Electric Space Sciences Laboratory in Valley Forge, where he did research in high altitude aerodynamics. He developed what is now referred to as the Weinbaum-Weiss model of the high altitude laminar near wake. He became active in the anti-war movement of the 1960s and returned to academia in 1967 as an associate professor in the Department Mechanical Engineering at The City College of New York. He was promoted to professor in 1972, became a Herbert G Kayser Chair Professor in 1980 and a CUNY distinguished professor in 1986. Weinbaum married Alexandra Tamara Wolkowicz in 1962 and they have two children, Alys Eve Weinbaum and Daniel Eden Weinbaum.