Robert S. Germain ’82

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The Class of 1982 mourns the loss of Bob, who died Jan. 17, 2024, after a two-year struggle with cancer.

He came to Princeton from the Bronx High School of Science in New York and majored in physics, graduating with high honors and joining Phi Beta Kappa. He was an active member of Cloister Inn and Ultimate Frisbee enthusiast. Bob earned his Ph.D. in 1988, advised by future Nobel Laureate Robert Richardson in the famed low-temperature physics group at Cornell University. After graduate school he became a postdoctoral researcher at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where he remained for 26 years as a member of the research staff. There he found his calling in scientific management, leading teams in areas including biomolecular modeling and scalable data-centric computing.

In 2015, Bob left IBM to become an engineering manager at Google, where his team was responsible for Google’s Colossus file system, which, as he was fond of pointing out, efficiently stored your documents and cat videos. He published 30 scientific reports and was an inventor on a dozen patents. Bob was devoted to his family, active in his synagogue, and loved science fiction, music, and technology. We will miss his wry sense of humor.

Our class offers its condolences to his wife, Janet; daughter Abigail; and sister Ellen.

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