Roderich Engelmann

Roderich Engelmann, Stony Brook University Professor Emeritus, passed away Feb. 29, 2016 at his home in Delray Beach Florida after a lengthy battle with multiple myeloma. He was 76 years old.

Rod received his PhD in 1966 from the University of Heidelberg working on the weak interaction properties of hyperons. After several years on the staff at Argonne National Laboratory, he joined the Stony Brook faculty in 1973 and advanced to the rank of full professor in 1980. Early in his Stony Brook days, he led studies of high energy neutrino interactions and 200 GeV proton collisions at the newly commissioned Fermilab accelerator. In an extended stay at CERN in the 1980’s, he exploited the UA2 data from the proton-antiproton collider to study the newly discovered W and Z bosons and high transverse momentum processes. During a leave at BNL, he worked to characterize the magnets for the accelerator that ultimately became RHIC. For many years he worked on the DZero experiment analyses of the production of single photons. More recently he played an important role in the ATLAS experiment in calibrating the response to electrons and photons, essential elements for the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. He was the adviser to nine graduate students.

Rod had a special talent for teaching the pre-med introductory physics courses. He started to work on internet-based education years before it became a major trend. He combined his understanding of the email, blogging and other WEB-based methods as a way to engage students. He used these and other computer-based tools to create novel and more effective ways to teach introductory physics. A 2009 interview with Rod about his teaching methods can be seen here .