John Imbrie ’48

John was born July 4, 1925, in Penn Yan, N.Y. He had a distinguished career in earth sciences research and teaching geology, paleontology, and oceanography. He was an Army World War II combat veteran of the 10th Mountain Division and was wounded in Italy.

While at Princeton he graduated with election to Phi Beta Kappa and married Barbara Zeller. He went on to earn a doctorate at Yale in 1951. He joined the Columbia University faculty and was named geology department chair in 1960, before being invited in 1967 to Brown University.

From 1981 until retirement from Brown in 1990, he directed a multi-institutional, international research program using time-series analysis of ocean-floor cores to identify the timing and variability of orbital-scale environmental changes.

From 1973 to 1975, while on a National Research Council panel, he helped develop a multi-institutional 10-year study of climate change, establishing the relation between the variations of Earth’s rotation and repeated ice ages. In 1978 he was named to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1981 became a MacArthur Fellow. He received numerous other scientific honors

John died May 13, 2016, in Seekonk, Mass., the family home for half a century. He is survived by his wife, Barbara; daughter Katherine; son John Z.; and three grandchildren.