Foreword: Fourth Shape Casting Symposium in Honor of John Berry

Excerpt

It was the spring of 1990 when the paths of Prof. John T. Berry and mine crossed for the first time. At that time, I was looking for research opportunities in castings at graduate schools. I had written a letter to the Ph.D. supervisor of my father, the late Prof. Voya Kondic, who had then forwarded my request to one of his many former Ph.D. students, John Berry. Prof. Berry was the head of the Metallurgical Engineering Department at the University of Alabama—Tuscaloosa at that time when he sent me a letter and kindly offered me a graduate assistantship. It was an agonizing decision to pursue my M.S. degree elsewhere, and it was even more agonizing to send a letter to Prof. Berry informing him that I would have to decline his offer. In the letter, I wrote that he would always be my friend and that I hoped to meet him one day. I thought that I had offended this kind man by deciding not to join his program. I could not have been more wrong. …