John A. Jungerman: nuclear lab’s founding director

Jungerman

John A. Jungerman, professor emeritus of physics and founding director of the university’s Crocker Nuclear Laboratory, died March 28. He was 92.

As a graduate student at UC Berkeley and Los Alamos during World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project, witnessing the first atomic bomb test, “Trinity,” at White Sands, N.M., in 1945.

Jungerman joined the fledgling Department of Physics at UC Davis in 1951, the same year that the College of Letters and Sciences was established. He officially retired in 1991, but was recalled on several occasions for research or teaching.

In the 1960s, Jungerman sought to build a research particle accelerator for the UC Davis campus to support the graduate program in physics. Ernest Lawrence, director of the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory (now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) offered two giant magnets from a surplus cyclotron that could be used to build a new accelerator.

The magnets were transported from Berkeley to a site next to the UC Davis hog barn on what was then the western edge of campus, and the building housing the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory was built around the new machine.

In 2011, the campus gave a name to the building: John A. Jungerman Hall. He was there for the ceremony, in his trademark purple socks and sandals.

Since the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory opened in 1966, the cyclotron has been used not only in nuclear research, but in measuring air quality in national parks, testing the authenticity of historic artifacts, making radioisotopes and treating eye cancer.

Jungerman earned an associate’s degree from Modesto Junior College (1941) and a bachelor’s degree in physics from UC Berkeley (1943). He received his Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley in 1949 and worked at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory with Lawrence and at Cornell University with Hans Bethe before joining the UC Davis faculty.

Services will be announced at a later date.

Sydney Kustu: Alumna, faculty member in bacteriology

Kustu

Sydney Kustu, a UC Davis alumna and former faculty member, died March 18 at the age of 71. She was a professor emerita in UC Berkeley’s Department of Plant and Microbial Biology.

“Kustu has made major contributions to our understanding of the regulation of gene expression,” read a statement accompanying her induction to the National Academy of Sciences. “Her work has led to the identification of the novel mechanisms responsible for the regulated expression of the enzymes and transport systems involved in nitrogen metabolism in bacteria.”

Born in Baltimore, she earned a bachelor’s degree at Harvard University and a doctoral degree in biochemistry from UC Davis, and did post-doctoral work at UC Berkeley until 1973 when she was appointed to the UC Davis bacteriology faculty.

She remained at UC Davis until 1986, when she returned to Berkeley as a member of what was then called the microbiology and immunology faculty, with a dual appointment in plant pathology.

She was instrumental in the revitalization of the field of microbiology on the Berkeley campus, according to an obituary on the College of Natural Resources website. She retired in 2010.

Kustu was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Microbiology; and held a a number of national and international professorships, including a prestigious Gauss Professorship at Universität Göttingen.

She is survived by her son, Saul Kustu of Aptos, and sisters, Roberta Glassman of Calabasas (Los Angeles County) and Marica Govons of Belmont Shore (Long Beach).

To honor Professor Kustu's life and her many contributions to the University of California, the UC Berkeley Department of Plant and Microbial Biology is organizing a program to be held at 4 p.m. Friday, May 2, in the Toll Room at Alumni House on the Berkeley campus.

For donations in Professor Kustu’s honor, the family suggests Planned Parenthood as the recipient.

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