Vern Knudsen

Vern Oliver Knudsen was an American acoustical physicist and university administrator who helped establish architectural acoustics as a distinct engineering discipline. After earning his PhD in physics from the University of Chicago in 1922, he worked at Bell Laboratories alongside acoustics researcher Harvey Fletcher before joining UCLA, where he served as Dean of the Graduate Division for 24 years beginning in 1934, a period during which the university's enrollment grew from 287 to 5,160 students, and briefly as UCLA's chancellor from 1959 to 1960. During the Second World War he directed the University of California's Division of War Research, contributing to improvements in sonar technology. He co-founded the Acoustical Society of America and served as its president from 1933 to 1935, and his books Architectural Acoustics in 1932 and Acoustical Designing in Architecture in 1950 became standard references in the field; he received the Wallace Clement Sabine Medal in 1958 and the Acoustical Society of America's Gold Medal in 1967, and a UCLA building is named in his honor.