more options

Bernard Gittelman, Cornell professor emeritus of physics, died Nov. 25 at age 74 from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Gittelman earned his Bachelor's and Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then worked as a research associate at Princeton from 1958-1966 and Stanford from 1966-1969. At Stanford he collaborated with Burton Richter, Gerard O'Neill and W.C. Barber to construct the first colliding beam device.

Gittelman joined Cornell's faculty in 1969 and was a pioneer in the design and development of storage rings at the Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory. He was a leader in the design and construction of the CLEO detector, the large multi-university collaboration devoted to exploiting the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) facility to study the production and decay of new particles containing heavy quarks.

In 1987 Gittelman was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "for contributions to the design of storage rings and detectors as well as for contributions to the understanding of the physics of the production and decay of B mesons."

"Bernie was one of the key reasons why Cornell and the CLEO collaboration led the world in heavy quark physics during the 1980s and 1990s," said friend and colleague Karl Berkelman, professor emeritus of physics at Cornell.

After his retirement, Gittelman continued his involvement with the CLEO research program, in spite of his illness.

He is survived by his wife Sandra, brother Joseph, daughter Jan, sons Arye and Joshua, and four grandchildren.