Donald Frey, a longtime Northwestern engineering professor, died at 86 of a stroke March 5 at Evanston Hospital.
Frey taught undergraduate students in innovation and entrepreneurship and information systems at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and helped develop the design for the Ford Mustang.
“Don was unique in the sense that he was probably the only person that you can think of here that was involved in a project from its inception to its completion,” McCormick Dean Julio Ottino said.
Frey had also monitored doctoral students and taught first-year engineers in engineering design and communication. Associate Dean Stephen Carr said students and staff revered Frey for his teaching methods and personality.
“The students found him awesome and admired him enormously,” he said. “He was a sage in residence, and he would talk about how the real world made progress with technologies. Students would come and sit at his feet to drink in what he would say.”
Before becoming a professor at NU in 1988, Frey worked at several industrial businesses, including Ford Motor Company, General Cable Corporation and Bell & Howell Company. During his final years at Ford Motors, Frey worked with a team of Ford engineers and helped design the original 1964 Ford Mustang. The entire process took only 18 months.
In just two years, the company sold more than one million cars, and the design quickly became an American automobile classic. However, Frey told Northwestern Magazine that beyond the Mustang design, his biggest accomplishment was the implementation of disc brakes and radial ply tires that have helped reduce automobile accidents.
By 1968, Frey left Ford and briefly was the president of the General Cable Corporation. In less than three years, he assumed the role of president and CEO at Bell & Howell, a company initially involved in film and movie production.
“He was able to take an organization that was focused on businesses that were declining, and through technology-particularly digital technology-he moved them into the 21st century,” said William White, former president of Bell & Howell and current engineering professor at NU.
As a professor at NU, Frey incorporated his experiences at Ford and Bell & Howell by passing on his life experiences and integrating outside material into the classroom, faculty members said.
“He really loved to bring concrete examples to discuss with students because he wanted them to think about real world problems,” said Gina Myerson, assistant dean of McCormick. “He was able to augment what he saw today because of his personal experiences with the design process.”
In a previous Northwestern Magazine interview, Frey said, “I teach from experience. I don’t have any research. I have a lifetime of industrial innovation. For me, teaching and innovation depend on one another. I don’t know how to separate them.”
Frey received recognition from a variety of sources for his ingenuity in design, including former President George H.W. Bush, who bestowed onto Frey the National Medal of Technology in 1990. Exemplifying his devotion to engineering and innovation, in 2001 Frey established the Margaret and Muir Frey Prize in honor of his late parents. The prize is awarded to undergraduate engineer students who demonstrate extraordinary design creativity for projects that address innovative solutions to current problems or design new products. The annual cash prizes, totaling $35,000, were personally funded by Frey.
Members of the NU engineering community remember Frey as uniquely gifted in strengthening the importance of design and application in engineering.
“We had a treasure, and we really did benefit from him being in our presence,” Carr said.[email protected]
