Harry Dahl Holmgren

Professor Emeritus Harry D. Holmgren, who retired from the University of Maryland Department of Physics in 1993, died on September 29, 2016. He was 88.

Prof. Holmgren received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Minnesota. Following completion of his doctorate in 1954, he was appointed as a physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory, where he worked before joining this Department as an Associate Professor in 1961. In 1965, he was promoted to full Professor and was appointed Director of the UMD Cyclotron Laboratory, a post he held for 13 years. That facility was described in a Washington Post feature article in 1977, citing “man’s ageless struggle to unlock the secrets of the universe”.

Harry D. Holmgren (1928-2016)

Prof. Holmgren was President of the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) from 1980-87, the crucial period in which that consortium of 31 campuses successfully sought federal funding for the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) in the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab). During his presidency, he forced the organization to look beyond the accelerator envisioned by the University of Virginia physics group, which was based on old technology. Instead, he persuaded Hermann Grunder from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to join the CEBAF group as director, leading to the innovative design of the accelerator. Prof. Holmgren also pushed SURA to consider other possible areas of research; this led to SURAnet, a high-speed communications web among 18 East Coast campuses funded by the NSF and directed by UMD computer scientist Glenn Ricart . Many of today’s internet protocols were developed by SURAnet.

Prof. Holmgren was a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and was honored during his career with an AEC Pre-doctoral Fellowship, the E. O. Hulbert Award of the NRL, the Arthur A. Fleming Award for an Outstanding Young Scientist in Government, a NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship and Honorary Membership of the Maryland Academy of Science. He was appointed a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the University of Paris at Orsay and was a member of Sigma Xi and Phi Beta Kappa.