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Professor Stanley Prussin died at home in Kensington, California on August 20, 2015 after a lengthy illness.

He received his B.S. (1960) from MIT, and his M.S. (1962) and Ph.D. (1964) from the University of Michigan, all in Chemistry.  After postdoctoral work at LBNL, he joined the Nuclear Engineering Department at Berkeley in 1966, where he served until his transition to Professor of the Graduate School in 2004.

Professor Prussin was internationally recognized in nuclear physics, chemistry, and instrumentation. He was the author of a widely used book, Nuclear Physics for Applications: A Model Approach.

After 9/11, Prussin’s research turned towards nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear forensics.  Many of his former students became senior figures in the DOE labs.

Prussin was solicitous for the University’s mission of public education for the broad representation of California’s citizens, and served briefly as Associate Dean for Special Programs in the College.

In his final three years, he created a new course with Professor Michael Nacht “Nuclear Technology and Policy”, served on an IEEE/APS national study of the Domestic Nuclear Defense Organization, and did pioneering work in nuclear forensics.  He mentored his four remaining Ph.D. students up to the week of his passing.

He was a beloved colleague, student advisor, and mentor, and made valuable contributions to the radiochemistry, nuclear security policy, and education focus areas within the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium. He mentored several NSSC graduate students and many other nuclear engineering and chemistry students at the University of California Berkeley. Through his strong relationships with the national laboratories, he has been able to provide many of those students with opportunities to conduct research in-residence at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Professor Prussin is survived by his wife Traudel, herself a chemist and artist, and daughters Stephanie and Alexa.

Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass.

Eric Norman, Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and NSSC Physics Focus Area Lead, is part of the Neutrino Astrophysics Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which contributed to the groundbreaking results from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in 2002.

Today, NSSC students and affiliates at UC Davis, led by Robert Svoboda, continue to contribute to the cutting-edge research in neutrino physics at both SNO and the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector in Japan.

We are very pleased to announce that Professors Kai Vetter and Lee Bernstein have been elected Fellows of the American Physical Society. Prof. Lee Bernstein was recognized “for work developing novel methods of determining neutron-nucleus cross sections via high-resolution γ-ray spectroscopy, the early development of surrogate ratio method, and the study of nuclear processes in high energy density plasmas at NIF.” Prof. Kai Vetter was recognized “for pioneering contributions to fundamental radiation detection techniques, particularly gamma-ray imaging, and important societal applications.” Congratulations, Lee and Kai!