Avery Catlin

Avery Catlin (January 29, 1924 – January 15, 2011) served as the associate dean in the school of engineering and applied science and chairman of several departments, and executive vice president of the university from 1974 to 1982. He was the first person to serve as executive vice president of the University of Virginia.

Avery Catlin

Biography

Catlin was born in New York in 1924 and first came to the Charlottesville area as a UVa undergraduate. He eventually earned a Ph.D. in physics.

Avery Catlin attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H., and then the University of Virginia. He was commissioned as an officer in the Navy and served in the South Pacific during World War II. At the end of the war he returned to the university and obtained a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, and a master’s and PhD in physics. As an early scholar of computer science, he was viewed as the University’s “father of computing.”

He married his childhood sweetheart, Edith Reed Catlin. He was among the founders of Piedmont Tractor and Belfield School, Chairman of the Albemarle Planning Commission for eight years, President of Farmington Hunt Club, on the vestry of St. Paul’s Ivy and Board of Blue Ridge School, and a member of Farmington Country Club and Edgartown Yacht Club in Edgartown, Massachusetts on the island of Martha's Vineyard.

At one point he was a part-owner of Piedmont Tractor before deciding to concentrate on academia. He was associate dean of the School of Engineering before becoming executive vice president. When he assumed that position, he stepped down from the Albemarle County Planning Commission. After stepping down as executive vice president in 1982, he returned to the school to teach engineering courses.