Begell House History

Begell House, Inc. was established as a source of scholarly publications in 1991 by Dr. William Begell, who has had a long and distinguished career as a chemical-nuclear engineer, researcher and publisher.

Dr. Begell taught at Columbia University and was the Engineering Director of its Heat Transfer Research Facility. There, he managed the large-scale seminal work on two-phase flows, burnout studies and cooling procedures for nuclear reactors, some of which were conducted directly under the founder of the US Nuclear Navy, Admiral Hyman Rickover. He then became involved in a US Air Force intelligence project, that culminated in the cofounding of Scripta Technica (1962), a publishing company specializing in the presentation of important scientific and engineering materials translated from foreign languages into English. Building upon his experience and reputation in the field, Dr. Begell was a founder and continued to pursue his personal research and publishing activities at Hemisphere Publishing Corporation (1966) where he developed an impressive list of 86 high-impact engineering and biomedical journals as well as hundreds of text and research books and reference tools.

Dr. Begell’s visionary sense of future trends in engineering and biomedicine led to the creation of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary publications. Throughout the years, Dr. Begell’s contributions and support of scholarly societies were a factor in the development of new branches of knowledge. In some cases, these innovative titles led to the establishment of new fields of endeavor and study. Dr. Begell was one of the founding members of the Society of Scholarly Publishing and has been nominated for and granted many awards for his achievements in science, engineering and publishing. In 2005 he was awarded the ASME Heat Transfer Division Distinguished Service Award.

Today, the publication staff, authors and leading journal editors at Begell House, Inc. create, support and maintain new and existing projects under Dr. Begell’s founding philosophy and remain one of the few independent scholarly publishers in the world. Begell House subscribers include major research, academic and governmental institutions as well as industrial corporations worldwide.

We invite like-minded scholars and engineers to join our forward-looking ranks of collaborators in bringing modern information by modern means to the modern researcher and reader, while maintaining our traditional philosophy of investing in the future of science and engineering.