Obituary of Jan Schetzina (1940-2012)

Prof. Jan Frederick Schetzina

Professor Jan F. Schetzina, a Professor of Physics at North Carolina State University, passed away August 26, 2012 in Raleigh, NC. He was born November 29, 1940 in Moundsville, West Virginia. Jan graduated cum laude with a BA in Physics in 1963 from Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania. He went on to earn an MS in 1965 and a PhD in 1969 at The Pennsylvania State University. In 1970, Jan joined the faculty in the Department of Physics at North Carolina State University (NCSU) in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he spent a long and productive career.

A gifted teacher, Jan mentored numerous graduate students at NCSU in a career spanning nearly four decades. He published over 230 peer-reviewed publications and delivered 140 invited talks throughout the world. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush selected his physics laboratory as the site for a visit emphasizing the importance of advanced research and technology.

Jan’s research group did pioneering work in a number of semiconductors. Under the DARPA HgCdTe program in the 1990s, his group was among the first to do university research on MBE growth of HgCdTe. His group was also quite active in the III-nitrides, particularly in AlGaN grown by MOCVD for solar-blind detector and Focal Plane Array applications. He was a Principal Investigator in the DARPA AlGaN Solar Blind Detector Array program in the late 1990’s.

Jan was awarded seven U.S. patents and secured nearly $20 million in research funding for NCSU. Among his many inventions, he developed a prototype of the world’s first digital camera that senses only ultraviolet light. The first demonstration of a U.S.-built blue laser was carried out in his optoelectronics laboratory. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Jan also received the NCSU Outstanding Teacher Award and Alumni Research Award.

He was graced with a keen sense of humor and had a diverse range of interests and hobbies, including sports, fly fishing, and restoring classic cars. While poor health limited his activities in recent years, he enjoyed spending time with his family and derived great joy from the birth of four grandchildren. He is survived by his wife of 44 years, Patricia Crowe Schetzina, and daughters Karen Schetina and Cathy Walsh and their families.