Roger Dean Bengtson

Roger Dean Bengtson was born on 29 April 1941 to Fridolph Marvin Emanuel and Edith Evelyn Pearson Bengtson in the house his grandfather built on the family farm near Wausa, Nebraska.

His grandparents had emigrated from southern Sweden (Skåne). He was the only student in his class at the rural elementary school, which had between five and nine students. He graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1962 with a BS in mathematics and physics and went to work at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, as an aerospace engineer. He took that job because it offered the best chance of graduate school. He commented on working at Langley, “I had little understanding of the racism in Virginia at that time. Few of the staff at Langley Research Center were Black except for a group of Black women who carried out calculations that would now be done on a computer.” These were the women who were the subject of the hit film Hidden Figures.

Roger married Billie Spies in June 1963. He took classes part-time at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and completed an MS in physics in 1964. Following completion of his PhD degree at the University of Maryland in 1968, he joined the University of Texas at Austin (UT) as an NSF faculty associate. His intention was to sample academic life for a few years and then take a high-paying job in industry. He was promoted to professor in 1981 and remained on the faculty for 46 years.

His research work at UT evolved from atomic spectroscopy, the area of his thesis. His interests included edge turbulence’s connection with plasma confinement in tokamaks, spectroscopy, plasma diagnostics, radio-frequency heating, Alfvén waves, laser-produced plasmas in high magnetic fields, and helicon plasmas for rocket propulsion. He and his students built the PRETEXT tokamak, a machine that resulted in many papers and theses. He was a valued member of the UT Fusion Research Center’s Texas Experimental Tokamak (TEXT) research group, participating in many experiments.

Consulting with industry and government laboratories were activities that Roger saw as a responsibility as well as an opportunity to broaden his scientific understanding.

Roger had nearly 200 publications and supervised more than 30 PhDs. With almost all students, he became good friends and remained in contact long after the students graduated. Teaching and working with graduate students were especially enjoyable to him. He regularly taught the upper division modern physics laboratory, demanding both accuracy and quality writing.

Roger served as chair of the physics department from 1984 to 1988. Following his stint as chair, he spent a semester at the Institute of Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany.

He retired in 2014, though he continued to consult. Roger loved handball and played at noon during his entire UT career, often against much younger players. Other activities included woodworking, hiking, genealogy, and photography.

Billie died in 2022. That same year, Roger developed a health problem that required him to move from Austin to be near his daughter in Provo, Utah. In May 2023, sadly, his health further declined, and he never fully recovered. He died on 8 May 2023. Roger is survived by his daughter, Nissa (Chad) Allred; his son, Hans (John) Bengtson; two grandchildren, Carrick and Annie Allred; a great grandson, Sawyer; and his sister JoAnn (Terry) Wamberg.

Obituaries are published as a service to the physical sciences community and are not commissioned by Physics Today. Submissions are lightly edited before publication. Click here for guidelines on submitting an obituary. If you are a copyright holder who thinks that an obituary violates your copyright, please contact us .