Pursuit of excellence is an appropriate moniker for Gene Church, who died two months shy of 97 on June 5, 2022. One of several who came to Princeton from Theodore Roosevelt High School in 1942, he was devoted to physics, mathematics, and lifelong learning. Gene served in the Navy from 1944 to 1946 as a radar instructor in Chicago. He majored in physics and graduated with high honors in January 1948 prior to enrolling at Harvard, where he earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics in 1953.
Gene was employed as a research physicist for the Army from 1953 to 1994, after which he consulted through 2018. He spent his early career was at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he collaborated with Joseph Weneser and made a discovery later named the Church-Weneser effect. In 1959, he was awarded a Secretary of the Army Fellowship at the Neils Bohr Institute in Denmark, where he worked closely with Aage Bohr. Gene’s later career focused on optics, scattering, and fractal and chaos modeling.
Our classmate received numerous awards and was a fellow of SPIE, APS, Optica, and AAAS, a senior member of IEEE, and member of Sigma Xi.
In official retirement, Gene cultivated an interest in his early American roots. He was a member of the Saint Nicholas Society of the City of New York, the Society of Colonial Wars, and Sons of the Revolution. He was a member of the Princeton Club of New York for more than 70 years and at the time of his death was president of the Class of 1946.
Gene was predeceased by his wife of 53 years, Anne, in 2001. He is survived by his daughter, his son David Lent Church h’46, and David’s three sons. To them all, ’46 sends thankfulness for a life well lived — Oranje Boven!