Martin J. Cohen *50

Martin Cohen, physicist, inventor, and president and co-founder of PCP Inc., died peacefully July 10, 2017, at age 96.

Cohen graduated from Brooklyn College in 1941, and earned a master’s degree in 1947 and a Ph.D. in 1950 in physics from Princeton.

He was the first commercial developer of the ion mobility spectrometer (IMS), a device that can identify minute quantities of substances in ionized gases, with applications for security and industry. In the mid-1970s, Cohen co-founded PCP Inc., based in West Palm Beach, Fla., to manufacture IMS devices.

Cohen was a founder of the International Society of Ion Mobility Spectrometry. In 1996, the American Chemical Society named him a Hero of Chemistry.

He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, whom he had married in 1949 when he was a graduate student at Princeton. He is also survived by children Douglas ’74, Alice Cohen Charach ’76, and Marcia Jane Cohen; six grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.