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In Memoriam
*This page is under construction
Chuck Irwin (1935-2025)
John Charles Nathaniel (Chuck) Irwin was born in Rossburn, Manitoba. He attended high school in Langley, British Columbia, and subsequently studied Engineering Physics at the University of British Columbia. After serving as a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force, he returned to UBC to complete his PhD in Physics. He joined the Department of Physics at 91泡芙 in 1965 as a founding member. His research focused on Raman scattering studies of solids in particular high temperature superconductors. He served as Chair of the Department from 1980-1988 and held several other important service roles including with the British Columbia Research Council, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and on the Board of Directors of a local superconductivity company, CTF Systems.
Tony Arrott (1928-2024)
Tony Arrott was born in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. He earned his PhD in Physics in 1954 at Carnegie Tech, and joined SFU Physics as a Professor in 1968. Since 1954 Arrott has published over 200 journal articles and several reviews of his wide range of studies. In 1970, Arrott discovered point singularities in liquid crystals. He designed the Thermal Neutron Facility (TNF) at the TRIUMF cyclotron located at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, commissioned in 1978.
Arrott was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1969 and of the Royal Society of Canada in 1983. In 1985 he received a fellowship from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science to work with muons at the Meson Science Laboratory, University of Tokyo, and the National Laboratory for High Energy Physics (KEK), Japan. He received the Gold Medal for Physical Sciences from the Science Council of British Columbia in 1982 and the Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Physics from the Canadian Association of Physicists in 1986. In 1988-1989 he served as president of the Canadian organization, Science for Peace.
Neil Alberding (-2022)
Neil earned his PhD at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and joined SFU Physics in 1989. He wrote or re-wrote almost every lab activity in the undergrad program at the time, and also designed the the Studio Physics program at Surrey from scratch. He helped introduce various systems which are still in use at the department, including the Wiki, ioLab and Python as a programming language.
Michael Plischke (1945-2020)
Mike was born in 1945 in Czechoslovakia and his family settled in Montreal, Quebec when he was nine years old. He pursued graduate studies in the US, eventually completing a PhD at Yeshiva University in New York City. He became a faculty member with SFU Physics in 1976, quickly promoting to become a full professor in 1983. He served two terms as the Department Chair and then went on to serve as Dean of Science from 2003-2010.
He had a successful research career as a condensed matter theorist, publishing over 100 papers and mentoring many graduate students and postdocs. In 2006, he was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in recognition of his 鈥渟eminal work on the statistical mechanics of complex systems, including alloys, random magnets, classical fluids, aggregation, random surfaces, interface growth and deposition, and vulcanization.鈥�