Dr. R. E. “Buddy” Babcock taught and conducted academic research at the University of Arkansas for 53 years. After receiving his degrees from the University of Oklahoma, he joined the Exxon Production Research facility on Buffalo Speedway in Houston, Texas. After serving there as a Senior Research Engineer for approximately two years, he join the U of A chemical engineering faculty in 1965.

A consistent thread among his teaching and research projects is the theme of thermodynamics and fluid flow with an “environmental” emphasis.   He was Director of the Arkansas Water Resources Research Center for eleven years in which the majority of the topics involved water quality in the state.  He has served as Associate Director of the Integrated Petroleum Environmental Consortium for ten years.  This consortium of four universities (University of Arkansas, Tulsa University, Oklahoma University, and Oklahoma State University) has conducted over ten million dollars worth of environmentally related projects central to the domestic petroleum industry. He was elected AIChE Fellow in 2000.

After stepping down as the department head in 2001, Babcock devoted his research effort to fugitive hydrocarbon vapors and to alternative fuels and his teaching effort on the proper protocol in the laboratories and report writing.

Babcock and his wife Grace have three sons, Robert Jr, John Brook (deceased), and David Benjamin. They are both active members of First Baptist Church of Fayetteville and avid golfers. They and their extended family have co-sponsored and supported the Elizabeth Babcock and Mary Francis Kelly Endowed Scholarship with the Fischer family.

Arkansas Academy of Chemical Engineers, 2009.