In brief

The diaries of American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan ’25 will be edited by noted University of ­Connecticut history professor Frank Costigliola, who plans to have the book completed by late 2014. Kennan, whose papers are among the most-used collections at Mudd Manuscript Library, is best known for outlining the “containment” policy the United States adopted toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Costigliola is the author of three books and numerous articles, including an essay on Kennan that appeared in The Journal of American History.

In memoriam William E. Hopkins Jr., former electrical engineering professor, died June 4 in Bethel, Pa., after a month-long illness. He was 57. Hopkins joined the Princeton faculty in 1982 after earning a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland. He left Princeton several years later to join the Drexel University faculty. In 1994 he changed careers to become an actuary and worked for Mercer Health & Benefits, a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc.

Elle Starkman/courtesy PPPL Office of Communications

Douglas McCune, a computational scientist and co-head of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s (PPPL) compu­tational plasma physics group, died from injuries he suffered in a July 16 bicycling accident. McCune, who was 55, was participating in the “Ride for Runaways,” a weeklong 500-mile ride that raises funds for the Anchor House shelter for troubled children in Trenton, N.J. PPPL credited McCune as the “mastermind” and prime developer of TRANSP, complex analysis code used to make sense of experimental data from modern fusion research. The code simulates the behavior of fusion devices.

McCune was honored as PPPL’s ­Distinguished Engineering Fellow in 2001. He most recently was involved in the modification of ELVis, intelligent software that allows Internet-friendly graphical display of scientific data.