HIGHLIGHTS ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2025 46 IN MEMORIAM Gabor “Gabe” Koves of Boca Raton, Florida, died on March 4, 2024, at the age of 97. Koves was born in Budapest, Hungary, on September 10, 1926. He received his undergraduate education in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Budapest, and his graduate degree in metallurgical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago. From 1950 to 1956, he was a lecturer as well as an assistant and associate professor at the Technical University of Budapest. He survived the occupation of Hungary by Nazi Germany and subsequently the Soviet Union, but his career opportunities were severely limited. In 1956, he and his young family escaped the country by clandestinely crossing the border into Austria and subsequently traveling to the United States. The family spent the first few weeks in New York and then were transferred to Rochester after Koves landed a job with IBM Corp. From 1957 to 1988, he held various technical and management positions with IBM in New York, Minnesota, and Florida. His longest stint was in Rochester, New York, from 1956 to 1983. In his later career, Koves was appointed visiting professor at IIT, the University of Wisconsin, and the IBM Manufacturing Technology Center. After IBM, he started an engineering consulting business and traveled internationally with his clients. He authored more than 100 papers and two books and was elected a member of the Alpha Sigma Mu and Sigma Xi honorary societies. Robert “Bob” Allen Leeper, 88, of Beverly, Ohio, passed away on June 12, 2024. He was born on June 6, 1936, in Cambridge, Ohio. Leeper graduated from Cambridge High School in 1954, and Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) in 1958 with a degree in metallurgical engineering. Upon graduation, he worked at Vanadium Corp. in Cambridge, Ohio, in Research and Development. His career later took him to Interlake Steel (now Globe Metallurgical) as a plant metallurgist in Beverly, Ohio, then to Martin Marietta Corp. where he worked for 30 years in several positions in sales, executive management, and as a technical expert until his retirement in 1997. Leeper was a well-known and respected expert in the alloy and steel industries. He received numerous honors from his company and various professional societies. He also served in and was honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy Reserve in 1968. Koves Leeper MEMBERS IN THE NEWS Shipilov Wins Top TMS Award Sergei Shipilov, FASM, president of FIRST-M Consulting Ltd., Toronto, was named the 2025 winner of the Morris Cohen Award from The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS). This award honors “an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the science and/or technology of materials properties.” Established in 2012, the award is named after Morris Cohen, a member of the MIT faculty from 1936 to 1987 who made significant contributions to our understanding of the structure of matter and the processing of materials such as iron and steel. Shipilov is being recognized “for advances in the fundamental understanding of environmental effects on the mechanical properties and integrity of materials.” The formal presentation of the award will take place at the TMS-AIME Awards Ceremony during the 154th TMS Annual Meeting in Las Vegas on March 26. This marks Shipilov’s second Morris Cohen Award. He previously received an award with the same name in 2007 from the Metallurgical Society of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy, and Petroleum. That award was named after another Morris Cohen, a prominent expert in electrochemistry and corrosion science who worked at the National Research Council of Canada around the same time the first Cohen was at MIT. Shipilov
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