Jack Emerson Crow, condensed matter physicist and founding director of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) in Tallahassee, Florida, died on 3 September 2004 in Tampa, Florida. Diagnosed with cancer one year before his death, Jack inspired others with his determination to defeat his illness and with the courage he demonstrated during the last months of his life.

Born on 17 August 1939 in Angola, New York, Jack received his BS in engineering science from Cleveland State University in 1962 and his doctorate in physics in 1967 from the University of Rochester, where he worked in the laboratory of Ronald D. Parks. The subject of his dissertation was the effect on superconductivity of pair-breaking mechanisms. In one widely cited work, he found that the critical-field-phase boundaries of superconductors that have large amounts of magnetic rare-earth impurities increased and then decreased with decreasing temperature, a feature he determined was due to an additional pair-breaking mechanism from the molecular field of incipient magnetic impurity correlations.

Jack’s first position, in 1967, was with Brookhaven National Laboratories. His supervisor there, Myron Strongin, remembers the speed with which Jack could develop an idea, design an experiment, and produce meaningful results. Strongin and Jack’s areas of investigation included fluctuations and inhomogeneous effects in thin film superconductivity.

Jack joined Temple University in 1973 and codirected a laboratory that focused on uranium- and cerium-based highly correlated electron systems and, later, magnetic impurity effects on high-Tc superconductivity. He chaired the physics department from 1979 to 1982 and honed administrative and leadership skills he would later find essential. He took leave from Temple in 1984 to work for two years as a program director in solid-state physics at NSF.

In 1990, Jack became the director of MARTEC, the center for materials research at Florida State University (FSU). That same year, NSF had launched an open competition to relocate the national magnet laboratory or to have it remain at MIT, where it had been since its inception in 1960. By aggressively marshalling the resources of the state of Florida, the University of Florida’s ultra-low-temperature group, and the pulsed-field group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Jack pulled together an impressive team of scientists and engineers to write a competitive proposal. The world of science was stunned when, in August 1990, NSF awarded the contract to the consortium led by Jack, despite several scientific-panel recommendations to retain the location at MIT. The story made front-page news. At the time, not one resistive magnet of any significant size had been constructed in Tallahassee.

The task of building a new national magnetic field research facility was daunting. Jack used his formidable powers of persuasion to recruit world-class magnet designers and engineers to create an entirely new lab in an unused state-owned building three miles from the FSU campus. The 300 000-square-foot NHMFL was dedicated in 1994, with Vice President Al Gore participating in the ceremony. Jack was the founding director, and he headed the lab until five months before his death. In short order, the lab was running as a user facility with record-breaking high-DC magnetic fields—45 tesla with hybrid technology as of press time. Central to Jack’s vision was that NHMFL’s research efforts would be fundamental and multidisciplinary and that the lab would also be dedicated to outreach education. The NHMFL—“the house that Jack built”—currently employs about 350 people and provides comprehensive research in fields ranging from geochemistry to high-field magnetic resonance.

The lives of hundreds of people in the region and beyond were greatly enriched by their contact with this remarkable individual, whose extraordinary generosity of time and effort was legendary. Jack was loved and admired by those who were fortunate to know him.

Jack Emerson Crow