Robert James Swenson

Bob Swenson, professor emeritus of physics at Montana State University and former Vice President for Research and Development died on the 26^th of December, 2015 at his home in Bozeman, Montana.

Bob’s academic achievements and honors are many. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the Governor’s Award for Outstanding Service on the Science and Technology Council, the Montana State University (MSU) Alumni Excellence Award in 1986 and 1990, and National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Award for Outstanding Contribution to the “Experimental Program to Simulate Competitive Research” (EPSCoR). He served on the Board of Directors of the National EPSCoR Coalition, the Montana Biotechnology Center of Excellence, and the Association of Retirement Organizations in Higher Education. He served on the Board of Trustees of the EPSCoR Foundation, and the Associated Western Universities.

Throughout his career, Bob focused on creating a vital role for a research land-grant university in a rural state, particularly with regard to the impact of research on the education of undergraduates and on technology transfer to the micro-businesses in the state.

Bob was born March 3, 1934 in Butte, Montana. He received a B.S. from Montana State in Engineering Physics in 1956 and a Ph.D. in Physics from Lehigh University in 1961. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Lehigh, he received offers of fellowships from NATO, NSF, and National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to study in Europe. Bob chose the NAS Fellowship and spent two years at the University of Brussels working with Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine.

Following his work with Prigogine, he took a joint appointment between the Physics Department and the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics at the University of Colorado. But within a year, he received an offer from Temple University in Philadelphia that he could not refuse. During five years at Temple, Bob built up one of the strongest groups in Statistical Physics in the country. In his third year, he was elected Chair of the Physics Department.

But Bob always wanted to return to the Rockies. Beginning in 1968, with support from NSF, Bob started organizing theoretical physics workshops at Montana State University each summer. Then on July 1, 1970, Bob returned to Montana full-time as head of the MSU Department of Physics. He held that position from 1970 to 1990. He became Vice President for Research and Development in the summer of 1990, serving until 1998.

Bob was an important leader in stimulating research in a rural states that typically only received a small portion of federal research funding. Through Bob’s involvement in EPSCoR, he had a major impact on the ability of Montana’s universities to conduct research, bringing more than $200 million into the state of Montana. Bob served as chairman of the Coalition of EPSCoR States and served so ably – and with such a deep commitment to improving the nation’s science and technology enterprise -- that the coalition created a scholarship in his honor, the “Dr. Robert Swenson Scholarship,” at MSU. The honor was presented to Bob in Washington, D.C. on March 24, 1998.

From 1993 to 1995, Bob’s tenure as Vice President for Research saw the creation of the forerunner of MSU’s current Technology Transfer Office, where Montana State’s discoveries are made available through licensing for commercialization. He also helped establish MSU’s TechLink, which transfers discoveries made in federal labs to the commercial sector.

In 1998, Bob retired and assumed the title of Emeritus Professor of Physics and Special Assistant to the Provost at Montana State University. After retirement, he created the MSU Association of Retired Faculty and a research and education field station, located in Big Sky, focused on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Bob’s career is best summarized by a quote from him in a 100-year history of MSU publication: “A university’s distinguishing characteristic – the creation of knowledge – bears with it a public trust to transmit that knowledge,” Bob took the transmission of knowledge very seriously and believed that a research physics department was not complete until it had Ph.D. physicists whose primary focus was physics education. While at Temple University he conceptualized the position of a “teaching physicist” and later brought that feature to the MSU physics department by establishing a teaching group as a legitimate component of a first-rate research physics department.

Bob is survived by his wife Janet and children Kari, Paul and Johanna.