Professor Dick Plano died on January 8, 2012 in a continuing care retirement community in Massachusetts. He was 82 years old. Dick got his PhD in 1956. In his early career Dick made many measurements of elementary particle properties, including the first measurement of the parity of the neutral pion.

In 1960 he joined our Department, where he was to spend the next 39 years until his retirement. He quickly founded a strong program in high-energy experimental physics, starting with an advanced facility to analyze bubble chamber photographs. His NSF support included funding for a device called Precision Encoding and Pattern Recognition (PEPR) for scanning and measuring bubble chamber photographs semi-automatically under computer control. An outgrowth of this effort was one of the first powerful time-sharing computer systems, which controlled PEPR, analyzed the resulting data, and was made available to the entire Physics faculty, staff, and graduate student body starting in 1965. This pioneering computing effort gave the Department impressive computing power at an early stage in the development of computers.

In the 1980s Dick worked on a series of neutrino experiments using the Fermilab 15-foot neon bubble chamber. Starting in 1985 his major interest turned to electron accelerators and he joined the SLD experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which studied electron-positron interactions at the mass of the neutral Z boson. Dick especially contributed to the development of the Cerenkov Ring Imaging Detector (CRID) which was used for particle identification in SLD.

Dick enjoyed teaching at all levels, from large-enrollment introductory courses to mentoring graduate students; thirteen received the Ph.D. degree under his guidance. He wrote numerous computer programs in support of instruction, including record-keeping and teaching evaluation programs. His exam creation and exam grading programs are being used to this day in our Department. There are several awards in our Department named after Dick: the Richard Plano Summer Research Internships, the Richard Plano PhD Dissertation Prize, and the Richard Plano Outstanding Teaching Assistant Awards.

A memorial service is planned, but details are not known as yet. Dick is survived by his wife Louise, children Linda and Robert, a daughter-in-law and two grandchildren.

The family has set up a memorial website.

Contribute to the Richard J. Plano Endowed Summer Research Internship

Biographical sketch contributed by Mohan Kalelkar

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Last revised Jan 23, 2012
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