Farewell
This year, the college lost four professors emeriti, with more than a century of service to the college.
Arthur Bergen, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences, died in July 2014 at the age of 91. As an officer in the U.S. Army, Bergen served in World War II; after the war ended, he served with the Signal Corps in the Army of Occupation in Germany. He received his doctorate in electrical engineering from Columbia University in New York. As a field engineer for Westinghouse, his first foreign assignment was in Brazil, where he worked on the installation of a generator on a river in the rainforest. Subsequent jobs took him to other remote locations in the U.S. and abroad. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1958 and retired in 1991, serving as associate dean for 10 years in the interim.
Chieh Hsu, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering, died in July at age 92. Born in Beijing, Hsu lived through the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, when he was forced to evacuate. After serving in the army, Hsu was one of 60 students chosen in a nationwide competition for a scholarship to study abroad, in what he would later call the “lucky break which changed my whole life.” Hsu received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1951 and went to work at IBM in New York. Returning to academia, his first appointment was at the University of Toledo in Ohio. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1958, where he remained until he retired in 1991. He was the editor of the Journal of Applied Mechanics, invented the technique of cell-to-cell mapping for the analysis of dynamical systems and was honored with many awards, including election to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988.
Gareth Thomas, professor emeritus of materials science and engineering, died in February at age 81. Thomas grew up in Wales, obtained a doctorate in metallurgy at Cambridge University in 1955 and brought his skills as an electron microscopist to the Berkeley faculty in 1960. Thomas proposed and oversaw construction of the National Center for Electron Microscopy at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and served as its first director from 1983 to 1991. According to Uli Dahmen, director of the NCEM and a former student of Professor Thomas, “He put Berkeley on the map and made it a worldwide center for electron microscopy that attracted scientists from all over the world.” Thomas also achieved the rare honor of being elected into both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.
George Turin, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences, died in March 2014 at the age of 84. Born in New York City in 1930, Turin received his S.B. in 1951, S.M. in 1952 and his Sc.D. in 1956 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Turin joined the Berkeley faculty in 1960 and later served as EECS chair. In 1983, he became dean of the school of engineering and applied science at UCLA before returning to Berkeley. He helped found Teknekron, a Bay Area firm designed to strengthen ties between high-technology firms and university research. His career also included work at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, MA and the Hughes Research Laboratories in Culver City and Malibu, CA.