Obituary - Daniel Chemla

Daniel S. Chemla, a world-leading physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, USA has died at the age of 67 at his home in Kensington. Dr. Chemla had been ill for four years after suffering a stroke. He had been director of the Materials Science Division, and also of the Advanced Light Source. He also held an appointment as a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. Dr. Chemla was French, born in 1940 in Tunisia, and was a graduate of France's prestigious Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications. He received his Ph.D. in non-linear optics from the University of Paris in 1972. Dr. Chemla came to the United States in 1981 to work at AT&T's famed Bell Laboratories. In 1991, he was recruited to Berkeley Lab by then director Charles Shank, to become the first director of a newly formed Materials Sciences Division. Dr. Chemla earned particular praise because of his great leadership and contribution in resolving the Advanced Light Source's budget crisis. His achievements with the lab's nanoscale work also led the Department of Energy to select the Berkeley Lab for the opening of the first of five Nanoscale Science Research Centers in the US. Dr. Chemla named it "The Molecular Foundry." Dr. Chemla's great talents were not limited to science. He was a master of Karate - he won the 5^th degree black belt in karate, the highest rank awarded in Shotokan Karate of America. He translated Master Gichin Funakoshi's "Karate-do Kyohan", the widely accepted karate master text (Kodansha International Ltd. ISBN 0-87011-190-6) into French. Dr. Chemla was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He received the R.W. Wood prize of the Optical Society of America, and the Quantum Electronics Award of the IEEE Laser and Electro-Optics Society, and a Humboldt Research Award. Dr. Chemla is survived by his wife Berit, two children, Yann, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Britt Chemla Jones, an Art History lecturer in Houston, Texas. His biography was released by Berkeley Lab.
http://www.lbl.gov/today/2008/Mar/21-Fri/chemla-jump.pdf
The San Francisco Chronicle (March 24, 2008) carries an obituary written by David Perlman.