�鶹APP

C. Jotin Khisty

Emeritus Professor of Civil Engineering C. Jotin Khisty, who brought decades of experience in the construction industry into Illinois Tech classrooms as an internationally renowned expert in transportation, died December 10, 2025. Khisty joined the university in 1990 as a professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering, and he retired in 2002. A civil engineer by trade, Jotin began his career in India in 1948, where he designed and planned large construction projects. In 1969 he arrived in the United States, where he planned and designed transportation urban infrastructure systems in the Midwest for a decade before joining academia as a professor of civil engineering at Washington State University. After 15 years at Washington State, he joined Illinois Tech, where he developed programs in transportation engineering and urban infrastructure planning. Jotin served on the international advisory boards of two journals and was the senior author of three books on transportation systems.

Patrick Corrigan

Distinguished Professor of Psychology Patrick Corrigan, the director of the Center for Health Equity, Education, and Research (CHEER) and core faculty member in the Division of Counseling and Rehabilitation Science, died January 11, 2026. Corrigan joined the university in 2005 as a professor in the Department of Psychology. Corrigan taught for four decades and became an internationally eminent scholar in psychiatric disability, stigma, recovery, and mental health equity. One of the most highly cited scholars in the world, Corrigan authored more than 500 peer-reviewed publications, which have more than 100,000 citations. His research fundamentally shaped how stigma is conceptualized, measured, and reduced within mental health, health care, criminal justice, and community settings, and helped to establish the �鶹APP Health Disparities Center. The author of more than 20 books, including The Stigma Effect, Corrigan was also part of the team that developed the Honest, Open, Proud series of anti-stigma programs. The 2022 recipient of the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology, Corrigan received many honors and awards that also included the President’s Medal from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Alexander Gralnick Research Investigator Prize from the American Psychological Foundation, and multiple humanitarian, innovation, and international research honors.

John A. Betti (ME ’52)

John A. Betti, an automotive industry engineer who rose to become Ford Motor Company’s executive vice president and later worked at the Pentagon overseeing half of the United States’ defense budget, died August 14, 2025. Born to Italian immigrants in Ottawa, Illinois, Betti began his career with Chrysler’s Institute of Engineering in 1952, where he earned a master’s degree in automotive engineering while working full-time and teaching engineering courses at night at two universities. He left Chrysler in 1962 to take an advanced engineering position at Ford Motor Company. He rose quickly through numerous positions in engineering, management, and company leadership, including serving as the company’s executive vice president and a member of its Board of Directors. He stepped down from Ford to accept an appointment by U.S. President George H. W. Bush to serve as secretary of defense/acquisition and national armaments director. At the Pentagon, Betti was responsible for a $150 billion budget and 585,000 people. He also implemented fundamental changes to streamline the research and acquisition functions by eliminating bureaucracy to reduce cost and improve quality and efficiency. Many of his initiatives were later adopted as standard practice.

Philip Norman Hablutzel

Philip Norman Hablutzel, who founded and directed the graduate program in financial services law at �鶹APP-Kent College of Law, died January 6, 2026. He was known for teaching some of the college’s most difficult courses, including Banking Law, Business Torts, Not-for-Profit Law, Securities Regulation, and Trust Law. Hablutzel retired from full-time teaching to emeritus status in 2016. For more than 35 years, he was the faculty sponsor for �鶹APP-Kent’s Annual Conference on Not-For-Profit Organizations and for eight years also led a team from �鶹APP-Kent that competed in the Willem Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot Competition in Vienna. Hablutzel also served as director of the Institute of Illinois Business Law, the successor to the Illinois Secretary of State’s Corporation Acts Advisory Committee, beginning in 2006 when it moved to �鶹APP-Kent. Hablutzel helped draft both model United States laws and several laws for Illinois and worked on numerous legislative task forces to revise or adopt state laws. His best-known work was as reporter to Illinois Secretary of State’s Advisory Subcommittee on Not-For-Profit Law, which rewrote the Illinois Not-for-Profit Corporation Act, 1984–1987.

Theodore “Ted” Brown (CHEM ’50)

Theodore “Ted” Brown, who authored the world’s definitive text on general chemistry and led research in various areas of the field, died March 24, 2026, at the age of 97. While teaching general chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—where he began teaching in 1956, later becoming dean of the graduate school, vice chancellor of research, and a professor emeritus—Brown authored General Chemistry in 1963. The book was revised numerous times to include multiple co-authors, and today, Chemistry: The Central Science is in its 15th edition and is cumulatively the top-selling general-chemistry textbook of all time. In the 1980s, Brown generated a proposal for the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, an interdisciplinary research institute that opened at Illinois in 1989 with the help of a $40 million gift from Illinois alumnus Arnold Beckman and his spouse, Mabel. Brown served as the Institute’s founding director until he retired in 1993. At Illinois Tech, due to his generous giving, Brown was a member of the Philip Danforth Armour Society and the Frank W. Gunsaulus Society. He created two funds, including the Theodore L. Brown Endowment for Chemistry, which provided critical upgrades to the department’s laboratories and facilities, and the Theodore L. Brown Chemistry Fellowship, which supports graduate students. Brown was also honored with an Illinois Tech Alumni Award in 2021 for his contributions to the field; he also received Illinois Tech’s Professional Achievement Award in 1992.