Olin Norton

Huntsville High School

Class of 1971

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Olin Norton - Class of 1971 - Huntsville High School

First Name	Olin
Last Name	Norton
Graduation Year	Class of 1971
Gender	Male
Current Location	Starkville, Mississippi
Hometown	Huntsville, Alabama
Relationship Status	Widowed
About Me	ABOUT MY EMAIL ADDRESS: The only email address that works is opnorton@gmail.com I have listed my old MSU email addresses: opn1@msstate.edu, norton@dial.msstate.edu, and norton@icet.msstate.edu for the benefit of people searching for me using one of those addresses. But, email you send to one of these addresses will not be read. And now for my biography: If you know me, then you probably know me as Perry. That is my middle name, and it is the name I go by. Where to start? I was born. I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama where I attended Miss Freeman's first grade, then Terry Heights, Whitesburg, and Jones Valley elementary schools. After that, it was Whitesburg Junior High School and then Huntsville High School, where I graduated as a member of the class of 1971. In retrospect, I now realize that I grew up in a special time and place. The 1960's were a golden age for science and technology, with the space race (and the cold war) at a peak and towns like Huntsville were booming. Huntsville went from being a sleepy, small southern town in the mid-50's to a population over 100K a decade later. Many of my classmates had fathers (and mothers) who were scientists or engineers, and they were from all across the country. I realize now that I grew up in a much more cosmopolitan environment than did many people, especially those from the south, and I received a much better education as a result. I went to college at Mississippi State University, where I got a degree in mechanical engineering. After that, it was off to graduate school, first at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and then to the California Institute of Technology. After graduate school, I finally entered the workforce by taking a job at Mississippi State University, as a non-tenure-track research faculty member. The unit of the university that I worked for was originally called the MHD Energy Center, then was renamed the Diagnostic Instrumentation and Analysis Laboratory (DIAL), and then the Institute for Clean Energy Technology (ICET). (MHD stands for magnetohydrodynamics.) When I was a graduate student I did a summer internship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. During the summers of 1990, 1991, and 1992, I worked at Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) as a participant in the AFOSR summer faculty research program. In my personal life, I was a bachelor for many years. I finally got married at the ripe old age of 47 to the former Jean Marie Bailey from Gulfport, Mississippi. We were very happy together, but sadly we didn't have that long together, as she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in June 2007 and passed away in December 2008. I retired from the university at the end of May 2007. Since then I have done some consulting, and I still work part-time here at ICET. (State law allows retirees to work up to 1/2 time.) I am also working part time for Mississippi Ethanol, LLC, on some SBIR and STTR contracts we have been able to get funded. My professional interests include heat transfer, fluid mechanics, combustion, high-temperature gases and plasmas. I am well versed in applied mathematics and...(read more)