Obituary

Abstract

Robert (Bob) E. Apfel (1943–2002) Robert E. Apfel, physicist, and Robert E. Higgin, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Yale University, died of cancer on August 1, 2002. While several years have passed since Bob's death, an obituary had not yet appeared in Radiation Protection Dosimetry, and the proceedings of this Solid State Dosimetry Conference at Yale seemed uniquely appropriate to honour his memory. Bob was born in New York City on 16 March 1943. He graduated from Tufts University Magna cum Laude with a bachelor's degree in 1964 and earned his Phi Beta Kappa pin. His wife Nancy was also at Tufts and both went on to earn their graduate degrees from Harvard University in 1970: a PhD in Applied Physics for Bob and a Master's in Education for Nancy. Bob's extraordinary inventiveness became clear during his graduate studies at Harvard, when he developed a way to measure the tensile strength of liquids and verified the theory of homogeneous nucleation. To accomplish this, he produced minuscule drops of liquids that he suspended or ‘levitated’—a technique he developed and a term he coined, inside a host liquid by acoustic radiation pressure. This research earned Bob his first award, the A. B. Wood Medal from the Institute of Physics in 1971. That same year Bob accepted a position in Engineering and Applied Science at Yale University, where he remained for the rest of his life.