Active 1965-1996; Recall 1997-2006

Dr. Alan M. Schneider received his Sc.D. degree from M.I.T. in 1957 and came to UC San Diego in 1965.   He had been working with MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and with RCA’s Aerospace Systems Division for many years as a senior engineering scientist and, later, manager of systems analysis, and had assumed his entire career would be in industry. However, when Dr. Stanford Sol Penner and Dr. Roger Revelle extended the invitation to help start the new AMES Department at UCSD, he was enthralled with the idea. 

He knew it would be a big change for him to leave industry and for his wife, Marjorie, and four children to leave the East Coast. Boston neighbors and friends remembered that it took him a year to weigh the decision, but he came to the realization that research and teaching were more in line with his temperament and interests. In making the leap to academia, he quickly learned that he had found his true calling as a teacher and mentor. Dr. Schneider treated both undergraduate and graduate students with respect and a keen eye for their potential. It was important to him to welcome and to mentor new entrants to the field, and he worked hard to increase the proportion of women students in engineering. 

In his teaching and research, he specialized in navigation and guidance, particularly related to spacecraft. He also worked in dynamics, control theory, Kalman filter design, and simulation of complex dynamic systems. Like many engineers trained in the 1950s, Dr. Schneider was captivated by space travel. However, his interests also expanded throughout his career. Starting in the 1960s and 70s, he was a pioneer in environmental activism and in developing courses in and teaching environmental studies. He co-founded the San Diego Clean Air Council and was an early advocate for restrictions against polluters and developed a device that restricted fumes emitted at the gas pump. He received community service awards from the San Diego section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the San Diego chapter of the Sierra Club, and San Diego Gas and Electric Company.

Later in his career, Dr. Schneider became interested in the application of control theory to biomedicine, and collaborated with the UC San Diego Institute of Engineering in Medicine. He developed a robotic arm to help stroke patients with limb spasticity, and worked on computer-controlled orthotic devices, the automatic control of blood pressure during surgery, and the modeling of major physiological systems. 

While he was a modest man who spoke very little about his accomplishments, Dr. Schneider had an acute pride and an almost childlike excitement in being a pioneer in the field of space and was also proud of his role in launching the engineering program at UCSD. While at UCSD he met and collaborated with many influential colleagues: Professors Paul Libby, Shao-Chi Lin, Sol Penner, William Nachbar, Sia Nemat-Nasser, Harold Sorensen, and Benjamin Zweifach, and remained in contact with many of them  even after his retirement.

Among his many awards, he was especially proud of receiving Outstanding Teacher Awards from Warren College students in 1986 and 1989. While publishing over 100 papers in his fields of research, he valued his role as a teacher most of all and maintained close relationships with many of his students well into his retirement, including international graduate students who enriched his and his family’s lives with visits and with cards when they returned to their home countries. His children remember, “Our house was full of graduate students on Sunday afternoons, when they would hole up in the study with Dad and work through joint research issues.” Dinner conversation was always full of happenings at the university, and much of their parents’ social life in La Jolla revolved around relationships with university colleagues. 

Although Dr. Schneider retired in 1993 as a Professor in AMES, as Professor Emeritus he continued to do research and to teach at the undergraduate and graduate levels, giving his final UCSD course in environmental science in 2005, at the age of 80. After his final retirement from teaching, he took many classes at the Osher Lifelong Learning Center. He was firm about not studying science at this point in his life. Rather, he wanted to use his remaining years to learn and to grow in those areas in which he had not yet been able to apply himself. He showed a particular interest in his courses in literature and psychology. He also continued to read widely in politics, donating to a wide variety of political and environmental causes, and deepened his already significant knowledge of classical music. He was always ready to jump on a plane to go somewhere and he had a motto that, when anyone would extend him an invitation to visit, the answer would be “Yes!” 

He enjoyed time with his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Of his four children, two attended the University of California as undergraduates. His wife, Marjorie Schneider, was instrumental in the expansion of continuing education programming in biological and social sciences at UCSD as a staff member of UC Extension, now known  as the UC San Diego Division of Extended Studies.  She also brought many of the psychology and other social science luminaries of the 1970s to the campus to speak. One of his children and a grandson also chose careers as professors, influenced and inspired by Dr. Schneider’s example.

Aside from his incredible career, Dr. Schneider will also be remembered for his remarkable ability to adapt to new realities, new ideas, and new people, especially at that time in social history. Though he was absolutist in his thinking about scientific method, he was open, curious, and full of wonder, and joyful for anyone else’s success or happiness. His exaltation at the accomplishment of the first moon landing and of subsequent scientific and engineering milestones never diminished. He remained pure of heart, full of curiosity, innocence, and a sense of romance influenced by the movies of his childhood. His quiet commitment to honorable, modest, and loving actions endeared him to students and strangers alike.