Martin H. Garrell ’60

Physicist, environmentalist, sportsman, Marty wore several hats over his interesting lifetime. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he graduated from its Technical High School, where he edited the yearbook and swam. At Princeton, Marty majored in physics, played baseball for two years, managed the swimming team, and joined Key and Seal.

He earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana, where he married Janet Wendel and moved on to a 2 1/2-year fellowship at the DESY Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany, before returning to Illinois-Urbana. He later became associate professor of physics at Adelphi University in Garden City, Long Island. Marty added an early (2010) course on climate change to his regular physics and astronomy repertoire and expanded it to environmentalism more broadly, to great acclaim over time. He maintained a full teaching schedule to the end, commuting weekly between his Adelphi apartment and their home in the North Country of New York between the Adirondacks and Lake Ontario.

Marty and Jan both loved the outdoors — sharing fishing, hunting, camping, and dog-training interests while both, especially Jan, wrote on those subjects for outdoor magazines and newspapers.

Marty died Oct. 2, 2024. He is survived by Jan, to whom we send the class’s sympathies.