Obituary of Glenn Joyce (1939-2011)

Glenn Joyce of Alexandria, Va., died on Sunday, December 4, 2011, after a five-year battle with cancer. He was 72.

Glenn was a senior research physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, working as a contractor after his retirement in 2004. His primary accomplishments were the development and implementation of numerical plasma simulations, the theoretical analysis of the underlying physical systems, and research into other aspects of space physics. In the last years of his life he worked in the area of complex plasmas. In particular, he helped to develop the NRL ionosphere codes SAMI2 and SAMI3 that are the most advanced ionosphere models in the world.

The author of more than 120 papers published in the refereed scientific literature, Glenn received a number of awards at the Naval Research Laboratory for publication and special achievement. In 1989, he became a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Glenn was born June 24, 1939, in St. Louis, the second of three children of Myra and M.G. Joyce, a Methodist minister. He attended high school in Sikeston, Mo., and Central College in Fayette, Mo. At Central, he met his wife of 49 years, the former Anne Raine, and graduated with a B.S. in 1961.

After receiving his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Missouri in 1966, he joined the faculty at the University of Iowa, where he became a full professor. He left Iowa City in 1979 and moved to Alexandria, where he lived with his family in the same house for 32 years.

Glenn was an avid tennis player, a lover of opera, and a fluent speaker of German. In the last decade of his life, he enjoyed traveling to Europe, often with his wife, son and grandchildren, as well as consulting at the Max Planck Institute in Munich.

Survivors include Anne, of Alexandria, and his son, Adam, and grandchildren, Polly and Madron, of Brooklyn, N.Y. Sisters Lou Bradshaw of Bellingham, Wash., and Carol Joyce of Minneapolis also survive him, as do seven nieces and nephews, and eight grandnieces and grandnephews.