Frank Jahoda

Franz Carl Jahoda, who was born in Vienna, Austria on Sept 16, 1930, died peacefully on June 21, 2012. With his family he emigrated via England to the United States in 1939, and spent several years in Michigan where his Americanization included learning about baseball. He became a lifelong Detroit Tiger fan. He earned a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD in Solid State physics from Cornell University. He met and married Pat Towne in Ithaca and they moved to Los Alamos, N. M. where he worked first for two years in the Testing Division and participated in atmospheric testing in Nevada and on Bikini Island. He then moved to what would eventually become the Controlled Thermonuclear Research (CTR) division and spent the major part of his Los Alamos career working on peaceful uses of fusion with the goal of commercial power production. This field introduced him to physicists, many of whom became life long friends, from around the world who were doing similar work on fusion energy. Weekends were spent skiing or hiking in the local mountains with his family. He visited every continent except Antarctica in order to observe total solar eclipses. The first came by chance. While visiting their daughter at college in Minnesota in the winter of 1979, he and Pat made the short trip to Winnipeg, on a whim, to observe a solar eclipse. He and Pat observed 10 more, making another set of friends around the globe while traveling to many interesting places. After retirement, he played tennis year round, and continued to hike and cross country ski regularly with friends. He continued downhill skiing through the last winter of his life, making new friends with skiers willing to drive to Santa Fe ski basin. He is survived by his wife Pat, two children, and four grand children. Contributions can be made in his honor to The Ploughshares Fund, committed to peace through diplomacy and to a world free of nuclear weapons. Please contact this organization at www.ploughshares.org/ or by mail, 1808 Wedemeyer St., Suite 200, The Presidio of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94129. Cremation has been provided by Rivera family Funeral Options of Santa Fe.