Louis Michael Colonna-Romano passed away on 21 March 2018 in Boston. He retired as Lecturer in Physics at Clark University in May 2017, following a long and diverse career as a teacher, researcher, student, mentor, and staff member.
Lou was born on 18 August 1947 in Emerson, New Jersey. He was a dedicated student and won multiple awards in primary and secondary school. He won an undergraduate scholarship to MIT at the end of his junior year in high school but decided to first complete his high school degree. Lou obtained his BS and MS degrees in physics from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1969 and 1971, respectively, working in the laboratory of Earl Koller in experimental nuclear physics.
In 1970, while a graduate student at Stevens, Lou was drafted into the US Army. He was assigned to the US Army Ballistic Research Laboratories, Aberdeen Proving Ground, because an apparent connection was made by higher-ups between the decay of potassium ions and Κ+ mesons. As a research physicist at Aberdeen, Lou performed measurements on ion–molecule interactions and multiphoton ionization (with an emphasis on reactions that occur in planetary atmospheres), designed data acquisition equipment, and performed extensive computer modeling.
Lou left Aberdeen in 1981 to join the Digital Equipment Corporation, where he established a research and development group that investigated high-performance semiconducting and superconducting switching-circuit technologies. While at Digital he also obtained his MBA at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in 1989.
He left Digital in 1992 as part of their Engineers into Education incentive program and became a PhD student at Clark University. During his time as a nontraditional physics graduate student, he found his true calling and quickly became a valuable teacher at Clark, WPI, and Brandeis. He eventually became a full-time lecturer at Clark and taught just about every course in the undergraduate physics curriculum, ranging from introductory physics to electronics and computer simulation. He also was an active researcher and applied his programming skills to perform computer simulations in collaboration with Harvey Gould, Bill Klein, and others. Lou was proud of the fact that Dietrich Stauffer commended him on his largest simulation of the Ising model at the time (1994). Lou’s programming skills included generating all the figures for the books by Harvey Gould, Jan Tobochnik, and Wolfgang Christian by writing them in postscript, and programming GPUs and the Raspberry Pi. Lou coauthored 16 research articles in a wide range of fields, including nuclear physics, electrical engineering, and statistical physics.
Louis was dedicated to his students and was a mentor to many, as evidenced by the large number of students who came to his office at all hours. He had carefully considered opinions on everything and could have an educated discussion on any topic, including European history, his favorite composers, Dante’s Inferno, and climate change. With razor sharp wit and broad knowledge, he often included a relevant line or two of classical poetry or a historical reference in casual conversations.
His interests also included his Lionel O-gauge model trains, the design of a board game called “Computer-Rage,” building a Schober electronic organ, being a co-owner of a pet store, nature photography, and printmaking in his home studio. In one of his favorite stories, Lou photographed the New York City blackout from Hoboken, New Jersey during the evening of 9 November 1965. As he was walking through the Lincoln Tunnel, a policeman, thinking that he was a news photographer, gave him a ride to the New York Times. To Lou’s amazement the Times used his picture on the front page of the paper the next day. Lou liked to say that it was probably his most widely read publication. Lou was surely one of a kind.
His colleagues at Clark and his collaborators elsewhere as well as his former students miss him deeply.
