Obituary of William Crawford Dunlap
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.1929
W. Crawford Dunlap, Jr., died of complications from pneumonia in Newton, MA at age 92 on Jan 25, 2011. He is survived by his wife, Ellen (Hebrew) Dunlap and his daughter, Nancy (Dunlap) Morrison. He was born in Denver, CO on July 21, 1918. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and chemistry in 1938 from the University of New Mexico and a Ph. D. in physics in 1943 from the University of California at Berkeley. His thesis reported some of the first measurements on cosmic ray “mesotrons,” now mesons. From 1942 to 1945, as an assistant physicist with the US Department of Agriculture, he participated in research on methods of producing and characterizing freeze-dried vegetables for military use.
He was then employed as: research associate with General Electric Research Labs. (Schenectady, NY, 1945-1955); consulting physicist (General Electric, Syracuse, NY, 1955-1956); supervisor of solid state research at Bendix Research Labs (Southfield, MI, 1956-1958); and director of solid-state electronic research at Raytheon Co. (Waltham, MA, 1958-1964), before becoming Assistant Director of Electronic Components Research at the NASA Electronics Research Center in Cambridge, MA, a position he held from 1968 to 1970. In 1970, that facility was transferred to the Department of Transportation, and he became scientific adviser to the director. He retired from government service in 1974, but he continued to be active as founding editor-in-chief of the technical journal Solid-State Electronics, a position he held from 1959 to 1993.
Among other honors and awards, he was designated a Associate Fellow of the Union Radio Scientifique Internationale, a Fellow of the APS, and a Life Fellow of the IEEE. He was active in IEEE and its predecessor societies, chairing committees and, during 1966-1968, serving as a director of IEEE. Other society memberships include Sigma Xi, Phi Kappa Phi, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
After 1945, he specialized in the materials properties of germanium and silicon, investigated useful dopants for germanium, and studied single-crystal deposition techniques, developing fabrication methods that continued in widespread use for many years. Between 1948 and 1955, he was first or second author of fifteen papers in Physical Review, as well as authoring many other articles and papers in scientific journals and several book chapters. He also held over twenty patents. His book, An Introduction to Semiconductors, was published by John Wiley and Sons in 1957 and was one of the first, if not the first, graduate-level texts in this field. It was translated into a number of foreign languages, including Russian. It was still being cited in the technical literature as recently as 2007.
In the fall of 1957, he made the first of several trips to the former USSR. He reported on the scientific aspects of that first trip in the May, 1958 issue of Physics Today (vol. 11, p. 14 ). In that (highly recommended) article, he reported meeting with Academician A. F. Joffe in Leningrad and visiting several research laboratories at the institute headed by Joffe. He continued to Kiev, where he met with leading scientists of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, to several tourist destinations, and to Moscow, where he visited Moscow State University and the separate institute headed by Dr. Peter Kapitza. The article ends with commentary about the state of solid-state physics research and device development in the Soviet Union at that time.
A noteworthy feature of the article is that many of his visits to important institutes and scientists were arranged on very short notice, in part because the slowness of communications in those days, especially across the Iron Curtain, made advance arrangements difficult. That he was able to make the visits was due to his reputation and his network of personal contacts.
His extracurricular interests included folk dance. He and his wife participated in a demonstration group that performed Russian folk dances on television in Schenectady, NY, during the 1950s. He studied foreign languages as a hobby throughout his adult years, acquiring reading and speaking ability in German, Russian, and Spanish. He was an enthusiastic birder from his youth until late in life. As an amateur tennis player, he was highly ranked in singles and doubles in New York State and in New England in the 1950s and 1960s, and he continued to play until after age 70. In his later years, he developed a strong interest in armchair astronomy, especially cosmology.
The Boston Globe