Thomas A. O’Halloran

Thomas A. O’Halloran died 28 March, 2015 at the age of 83 in Green Valley, Arizona. Tom was born on 13 April 1931 in Brooklyn New York. His parents were immigrants from County Cork in Ireland.

He received his BA in physics at Oregon State University and afterward served four years as an officer in the United States Navy aboard the USS Ruddy and in Las Vegas, Nevada. He then attended the University of California at Berkeley and in 1963 received a PhD in Physics under the supervision of Gerson and Sulamith Goldhaber. At Harvard in 1964-65 he participated in experiments at the Cambridge Electron Accelorater and studied the photoproduction of numerous final states using the 12 inch hydrogen bubble chamber.

In 1966 O’Halloran joined the Physics Department of the University of Illinois as an Assistant Professor and continued analysing bubble chamber to study various interactions of positive K mesons with protons. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1968 and Professor in 1970. He was selected as co-principal investigator of the high energy group in 1971.

He participated in the development of newer types of spark chamber detectors including a 1.5 meter streamer chamber and utilized these in numerous experiments at the Argonne, Brookhaven and Fermilab laboratories. In 1989 he joined his former student Pierre Sokolsky as a visiting scholar at the University of Utah where development of the Extensive Air Shower Array near Salt Lake City was ongoing. This array measured the properties of the most energetic cosmic ray showers entering the earth’s atmosphere. He retired from the University of Illinois faculty in 1993.

O’Halloran was quite active in the high-energy community. He served on numerous review committes at Brookhaven and Fermilab. He was a fellow in the APS (Particle and Fields Division) and was a member of its executive commitee. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979-80.

Tom and his wife Barbara moved to Salt Lake City after retirement, but liked to vacation in Tucson during the winter months, where they eventually moved permanently. Tom was loved by everyone, his colleagues, students and staff. His sharp wit and infectious laughter heartened us all.

Lee Holloway