Edwin L. Carstensen, A scientist’s life

Abstract

Born in 1919, Edwin L. Carstensen grew up in Oakdale, Nebraska. Thinking to be a teacher or preacher, Ed attended Nebraska State Teachers College, 1938-1941. An interest in physics and music led Ed in fall 1941 to Case School of Applied Science. But World War II interrupted; when his professor Robert Shankland was tapped to head the newly formed Underwater Sound Reference Laboratory in spring 1941, Ed followed and spent the war and early postwar years at USRL’s lab in Orlando, Florida. Thus Ed’s first serious involvement in acoustics was in underwater sound. Several publications emerged after the war; the most significant was the Carstensen-Foldy study of sound propagation through bubbly water (JASA 19, 481-501 (1947)). After PhD studies at University of Pennsylvania, 1948-55, where Herman Schwann introduced Ed to biophysics, and five years at the Army Biological Laboratory, Ft. Detrich, Maryland, Ed took a faculty position in Electrical Engineering at the University of Rochester. There he remained for the rest of his career. His work at Rochester was in biomedical acoustics, principally biomedical ultrasound. He made major contributions to identifying the physical mechanisms by which ultrasound affects tissue, lithotripsy, and tissue strain as an ultrasound bioeffect.