Henry Ehrenreich was born in Frankfurt on May 11, 1928, the only child of Frieda and Nathan\u2014a prominent pianist, choral conductor, and music critic.\u00a0 It was not an auspicious time to be born a Jew in Germany.<\/p>\n
First, in 1934, Henry\u2019s father lost his positions. Then, in November 1938, a week after Kristallnacht, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau.\u00a0 A few weeks later, on December 7, 1938, he was released with orders to leave Germany immediately. On December 17, after a series of operations for injuries sustained at Dachau, he fled to a refugee camp in Holland. \u00a0Henry recalled all these events vividly.<\/p>\n
Six months after Nathan fled, on June 20, 1939, Frieda entrusted 11-year-old Henry to the Kindertransport, the rescue mission that delivered about 10,000 children from Nazi Germany to foster homes in England during the nine months preceding World War II.\u00a0 The visa on which Henry traveled, and which saved his life, had been issued to a distant cousin whose family passed it on to Henry when they decided to stick together.\u00a0 In the following months, Henry was sent from a children\u2019s refugee camp in Margate to a Bayswater boarding school to a foster home in London.\u00a0 When not in school, he and two friends from the Kindertransport practiced English and explored the London Tube.\u00a0 When the British evacuated children from London, they placed Henry in Letchworth with a German-speaking family that harbored Nazi sympathies and maltreated him.\u00a0 Henry was desolate.<\/p>\n
On August 24, 1939, Frieda took one of the last flights to London from Frankfurt before war was declared.\u00a0 She obtained work as a housekeeper in Sussex and found Henry a home with a gardener and his family in Ditchling, near enough by that she and Henry could easily visit.\u00a0 The gardener, a compassionate fellow of limited means, was a self-taught pianist and composer.\u00a0 During Henry\u2019s Ditchling stay, his love for music\u2014long suppressed in Germany\u2014was reawakened.<\/p>\n
In the late fall of 1939, U.S. visas, for which the family had applied in early 1935, were issued, and Nathan arrived in New York City on December 5, 1939.\u00a0 In March 1940, sixteen months after Nathan had fled Germany and nine months after Henry had escaped Frankfurt, the family was reunited in New York. In 1942, they moved to Buffalo, where Nathan was employed as a choral conductor and Henry entered high school.<\/p>\n
Three years later, Henry concluded his valedictory speech at graduation by calling on listeners to \u201c… at all times think clearly, judge tolerantly, and act wisely\u2026for this is our solemn duty to our country and to mankind.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1946, having won a New York State Scholarship, Henry entered Cornell.\u00a0 He graduated in 1950, alongside a distinguished group of non-fraternity classmates self-labeled the \u201cgefilte phi.\u201d\u00a0 During those four years, he composed a string quartet, served as a teaching assistant in mathematics, and concluded that he would pursue a career in theoretical physics.\u00a0 Thoughts of plying his father\u2019s profession were set aside.\u00a0 In 1949, he met and began his courtship of Tema Hasnas, his wife from 1953 until he passed away on January 20, 2008.<\/p>\n
In the fall of 1951, after an academic year at Columbia, Henry returned to Cornell, to Tema, and to teaching assistantships in sections that included rambunctious future Nobelists Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg.<\/p>\n
By then, interest in semiconductor science had spread widely, fanned by the invention at Bell Laboratories in 1947 of a germanium solid-state amplifier\u2014the transistor.\u00a0 To understand the properties of germanium and silicon detailed studies of their complex electronic band structures, their lattice vibrations and their imperfections were needed.\u00a0 The challenging problems of electron transport posed by semiconductors attracted Henry.\u00a0 As Albert Overhauser\u2019s first doctoral student, Henry set to work on one of them: the scattering of holes in germanium by lattice vibrations. He completed his thesis and received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1955.<\/p>\n
From Ithaca, Henry took a second small step eastward to Schenectady, NY, to the General Electric Research Laboratory, the nation\u2019s first industrial laboratory.\u00a0 In 1955, this was the home of forefront research groups in surface science, solid state science, and nuclear engineering. In collaboration with colleagues and visitors, he investigated electron-phonon interactions and electron transport in compound semiconductors (e.g., gallium arsenide); sound absorption in insulators; and, in an extensive and influential series of papers, the optical properties of metals, semiconductors, and insulators.\u00a0 While Henry and Tema were at Schenectady, their three children, Paul, Beth, and Robert, were born.<\/p>\n
In the fall of 1960, Henry and his family spent a term in Harvard\u2019s Division of Engineering and Applied Physics, then led by Dean Harvey Brooks, who had come to Harvard from General Electric (GE) in 1950.\u00a0 Three years later, in 1963, he accepted an invitation to join the Division\u2019s faculty as a Professor.\u00a0 This third small eastward move (to Cambridge and Belmont and in summers to the Cape) would be his last:\u00a0 Harvard remained his home base until he passed away as Clowes Professor of Science, Emeritus<\/em>, a few months before his 80th\u00a0birthday.<\/p>\n As applications of semiconductor devices expanded explosively, so too\u2014informally and through papers and editorial activities\u2014did Ehrenreich\u2019s stature as a master whose calculations and insights explained and predicted the electronic and optical properties of the ever more complex ingredients these devices contained.\u00a0 Over forty-five years he authored more than 200 papers and reviews and co-edited (first with Frederick Seitz and David Turnbull, who came from GE to Harvard in 1962, and subsequently with Frans Spaepen) over 30 volumes of Solid State Physics<\/em>, a renowned and widely consulted annual review of major advances in solid state science and technology.<\/p>\n More than 30 years ago, during the \u201cfirst\u201d oil crisis, Ehrenreich was asked to assess solar photovoltaic cells.\u00a0 He headed the American Physical Society\u2019s Study Group on Solar Photovoltaic Energy Conversion from 1977-81, served on the Department of Energy\u2019s Photovoltaic Advisory Committee, and testified before Congress in 1985.<\/p>\n Over four decades he served and chaired innumerable national and international committees including the Solid State Commission of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics for ten years and the Department of Defense\u2019s DARPA Materials Council for twenty years. In 1991, he spent a term working with the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House.<\/p>\n Henry approached every activity\u2014whether for Harvard or others, and whether research, educational, or administrative\u2014with singleness of purpose, attention to details, and alertness to eventualities.\u00a0 He took care to touch bases and to rehearse presentations\u2014his own, his students\u2019, and those of the committees and groups he chaired.<\/p>\n He educated and mentored many students\u2014far more than the two dozen doctoral candidates and dozen graduate students whose research he directed demandingly and whose welfare he nurtured devotedly.\u00a0 With the Commonwealth\u2019s sanction, he presided at the wedding of one of his students and one of his teaching fellows!<\/p>\n When his day of no-nonsense work ended, he was ready to relax.\u00a0 The short ride home to Belmont brought a martini or two and music.\u00a0 Music was an important part of his life.\u00a0 He was an avid pianist, attended many concerts, and often discussed music with the many students, colleagues, and others who enjoyed the warm hospitality of the Ehrenreich\u2019s Belmont home.\u00a0 His close friends included performers, conductors, and scholars of music.\u00a0 And the Mozart he played as students streamed into his Core course was intended for him as much as for them.<\/p>\n The imaginative courses (graduate, undergraduate, Core courses, and freshman seminars) that Henry developed covered a broad range of topics: solid state physics; energy and environmental science and public policy; physics and music; and the history of science.\u00a0 His interest in the history of science led to his appointment as a trustee of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology.<\/p>\n Henry took special pride in bringing together students and other faculty from physics, chemistry, and engineering in the first multi-departmental, multidisciplinary course on materials and devices.\u00a0 The course was a natural complement to his efforts, as Director of Harvard\u2019s Materials Research Laboratory (now Materials Research Science and Engineering Center) from 1982-90, to foster strong and enduring multidisciplinary research programs.<\/p>\n As concerns about pollution and climate change grew, he spent more time working on the science and the economics of alternative energy sources\u2014especially solar and wind.<\/p>\n As chair of the Science Center Executive Committee and of the Core Committee on Science from 1987\u20131999, Henry was broadly involved in promoting and improving Harvard undergraduate education in science and engineering.\u00a0 He was continually engaged in recruiting other faculty and working with them on lectures and courses.<\/p>\n His widely recognized concern for others made it natural that, as a Professor Emeritus<\/em>, he be invited to serve, and that he agree to serve, as the University\u2019s first Ombudsman.<\/p>\n In addition to Tema and his three children, Henry leaves ten grandchildren.<\/p>\n Respectfully submitted,<\/p>\n Michael B. McElroy Henry Ehrenreich was born in Frankfurt on May 11, 1928, the only child of Frieda and Nathan\u2014a prominent pianist, choral conductor, and music critic.\u00a0 It was not an auspicious time to be born a Jew in Germany. First, in 1934, Henry\u2019s father lost his positions. Then, in November 1938, a week after Kristallnacht, he was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-335001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335001\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nPeter S. Pershan
\nFrans A. Spaepen
\nPaul C. Martin, Chair<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"