Jan A. Norton *66

Jan died of cancer in Red Bank, N.J., April 9, 2024.

He was born in Warsaw, Poland, shortly before World War II. His family eventually immigrated to Canada.

Jan served in the Royal Canadian Air Force Reserve and graduated from the University of Toronto in 1957 with an engineering degree. After graduating, he worked at Avro Aircraft on the Arrow supersonic fighter. He began graduate studies in electrical engineering at Princeton and won a national Bell Telephone Laboratories Fellowship for his third year in the engineering school. That summer Jan worked at Bell Labs on the first satellite communications experiment, Project Echo. 

While working on his dissertation, Jan got an offer from Bell Labs to join its control systems group. He worked on Telstar, a satellite capable of live TV transmission between the USA and Europe. This project took Jan to Brittany, France, where he worked on the 380-ton ground station antenna under a 210 feet in diameter radome.

During four decades with Bell Labs and AT&T (later Lucent Technologies), Jan worked on and managed projects in control systems, computer systems, and business competitiveness.

Jan is survived by his wife of 62 years, Maggie; three daughters; four grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Graduate alumni memorials are prepared by the APGA.