Meredith Gourdine

Meredith Gourdine of Cornell won the 1951 IC4A with a career best of 25-9¾ (7.87) and at the same meet won the 220y hurdles. In the Olympic year, Gourdine beat Jerome Biffle to win the Final Trials. One week earlier, at the AAU, he had also defeated Biffle, although finishing second to George Brown. However, Biffle won the one that mattered, finishing a bare four centimeters ahead of Gourdine in the Olympic final.

Gourdine became a renowned physicist, earning a Ph.D. in Engineering Physics from the California Institute of Technology while working as a Senior Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) from 1958-60. His early work history saw him on the technical staff at the Ramo-Woolridge Corporation from 1957-58, then at the JPL, followed by serving as lab director at Plasmodyne Corporation from 1960-62 and a chief scientist at Curtiss-Wright Corporation from 1962-64.

Gourdine founded Gourdine Laboratories in 1964, a research and development firm in Livingston, New Jersey, and later founded Energy Innovations in Houston, a company producing direct-energy conversion devices. He was considered a pioneer in the field of electrogas dynamics. Gourdine invented an engineering technique known as Incineraid to disperse smoke from buildings, which was later adapted to disperse fog from airports. Another of his inventions, Focus Flow Heat Sink, was used to cool computer chips.

He was inducted into the Engineering and Science Hall of Fame in 1994 and became a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1991. Gourdine was granted over 30 US patents and later became a Trustee of Cornell University.

Personal Best: LJ – 7.81 (1951).