Obituary of Roger Finlay (1935-2011)

Roger W. Finlay Roger William Finlay, Distinguished Professor of Physics Emeritus at Ohio University, died March 12, 2011 at Dataw Island, South Carolina.

Roger was born October 22, 1935 in Pittsburgh, PA. He received his early schooling and high school education in Pittsburgh. He then enrolled in Westminster College, New Wilmington, PA, before transferring to Johns Hopkins, where he completed his last year of undergraduate education and his Ph.D. in physics.

In 1962 he was hired as an assistant professor at Ohio University. His timing was excellent, since Ohio had just begun a Ph.D. program in physics and approximately twelve new positions were to be filled in the following eight years. Roger immediately began nuclear physics research with a small Cockroft-Walton accelerator. He became the thesis advisor for the first student to earn a Ph.D. in physics at Ohio University, as well as seventeen more to follow in the next thirty five years.

Roger worked very efficiently to utilize the machine available to him, while he simultaneously formulated plans for a larger accelerator. A major part of his plan was to persuade his colleagues that a significant fraction of the new hires should be in nuclear physics. Starting with Roger as the single nuclear physicist in 1962, the nuclear physics effort grew to include four experimentalists and four theorists by 1970.

The experimental group was successful in making a proposal to the (then) Atomic Energy Commission for an electrostatic accelerator which began operation in 1971. Specifications for the machine had been formulated to make possible a research program in neutron physics Many experiments in elastic and inelastic scattering of neutrons were completed during the first decade of lab operation.

When Roger became aware that the beam swinger magnet at Michigan State University’s Cyclotron Laboratory was about to become obsolete because of the installation of a larger cyclotron at MSU, Roger coordinated a proposal to the NSF to bring the spectrometer to Ohio University. This made possible neutron physics measurements with better resolution and lower background than before, since a part of the upgrade was the construction of a 30 meter flight path for neutron spectroscopy.

Roger continued to be active in measurements at Ohio University but during the last decade of his research career also became involved in some larger multi-institution investigations. These include the E665 experiment program at Fermilab, the charge symmetry-breaking experiment at TRIUMF and the total neutron cross section program at WNR (Los Alamos). In each case, Roger made special efforts to be not only a researcher but also an educator, going over the purpose and techniques of the experiment in detail with students and post-docs before the experiment. Beginning in the 1980s, a major shift in the nuclear physics program at Ohio U. took place, resulting in a much heavier emphasis on intermediate energy physics. Roger was the founding director of the Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics.

Roger also made a major commitment to teaching. He developed three new courses. One of these was a course intended for non-scientists focusing on the unity of wave phenomena, which still has a very large enrollment. He also co-developed (with faculty members from history and political science) and then team-taught a course on the influence of nuclear weapons on foreign policy. Roger was the recipient of a Dean’s Outstanding Teaching Award in mid-career.

Research recognition also came to Roger. He was made a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was named a Distinguished Professor at Ohio University. This award is given to one faculty member each year at the university and is base on national and international research reputation. Roger not only received the award himself but was particularly proud of the fact that he had been a member of search committees which hired three other members of the physics faculty who received this award.

Roger’s impact lives on, through major contributions to the development of the neutron scattering data base, identification of isovector effects in nucleon scattering, development of an impressive (in both number of isotopes and precision of the measurements) collection of neutron total cross section values, and the particularly influential role he had in establishing a vibrant and comprehensive nuclear research program at Ohio University.

-- Steven M. Grimes, Ohio University