User:Pedro St. John/Frederick Reif

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Frederick Reif (1927 - August 11,2019) was a physicist whose career included condensed-matter physics and science education research.

Early Life

Frederich (later Frederick) Reif was born in Vienna to Gerschon Reif, a dentist, and Klara Gittfried Reif, a homemaker. His parents had emigrated from the province Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian empire (now part of Poland) after World War I. His younger sister Liane was born in 1934. At the age of 10 he began studies at an academic gymnasium (roughly equivalent to high school) but the family's lives were disrupted by the rise of the Nazi party and the Kristalnacht pogrom.

Gerson Reif committed suicide in 1938 but the rest of the family was able to obtain passage on the S.S. St. Louis that departed Germany in May of 1939. The ship was not permitted to disembark in Cuba and was forced to return to Europe (but not Germany) with all 937 Jewish refugees.

The family lived in France until they obtained permission to emigrate to New York in September of 1941 having been sponsored by relatives.

Frederick Reif finished Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and started Columbia University but was drafted into the US Army at the age of 18. After serving he returned to Columbia (BA 1948) and then attended Harvard University to study physics (PhD 1953).

In 2012, Professor Reif with his sister Dr. Liane Reif-Lehrer, a biochemist, recorded their personal story of these early years for the Holocaust Project Born to Remember in a 4-part video Escaping and Surviving the Holocaust.

Early Career in Physics

Frederick Reif obtained his PhD on NMR studies of solid hydrogen under Edward Purcell, the author of the highly regarded Electricity and Magnetism, which is volume 2 of the influential Berkeley Physics Course.

In 1953, Dr. Reif joined the University of Chicago working with Enrico Fermi and continuing his NMR research and expanded his work to include studying liquid helium. But in 1960 he moved to University of California, Berkeley.

While in Chicago and at Berkeley he and his research group, normally small with one or two students, made important contributions including direct evidence for gapless superconductivity, electrons attaching to microscopic quantized vortex rings, and the discovery of an excitation process that led to increased understanding of UV luminescence of noble gas liquids and solids.

Frederick Reif was elected as a Fellow of the American Physics Society (APS) in 1964.

Later Career in Science Education

Eventually Dr. Reif would be appointed as professor of Physics and of Education at Berkely.

In 1965, Frederick Reif published Fundamentals of Thermal and Statistical Physics a textbook that was widely adopted by physics programs for decades. He followed this with Statistical Physics (1967), the fifth volume of the Berkeley Physics Course.

Perhaps his experience as a textbook author opened him to the challenges of teaching abstract concepts. In any case, he turned his research to science education becoming one of the early pioneers of the field that became Physics Education Research (PER).

In 1969, while still at Berkeley, he and Robert Karplus co-founded the Graduate Group in Science and Mathematics Education (SESAME) and served at its chair in the 1970s. SESAME was one of the first PhD granting interdisciplinary programs on discipline-based education research.

Dr. Reif moved to Carnegie Mellon University 1989 as professor of Physics and of Psychology until he retired in 2000.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) recognized his contributions in 1989 by electing him as a Fellow in the Education Section.

In 1994, Dr. Reif was awarded the Robert A. Millikan Medal (now the Lillian McDermott Medal) from the American Association of Physics Teachers, the medal recognizes notable and intellectually creative contributions to the teaching of physics. His acceptance essay was "Understanding and Teaching Important Scientific Thought Processes".

He published a third influential book, Applying Cognitive Science to Education: Thinking and Learning in Scientific and Other Complex Domains in 2008.

Upon retiring in 2000, Dr. Reif obtained professor emeritus status at both Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Family Life

While a child, Frederik Reif studied violin and played it all of his life.

He married three times. First, briefly to Mildred Spiewak (later Mildred Dresselhaus), who became a renown physicist. Then to Jill Larkin (later Jill Wellman), the cognitive scientist and frequent collaborator. His third marriage was to Laura Ott Reif, a nurse and senior gerontologist.

In addition to his sister, Frederick Reif was also survived by his niece, Erica Lehrer, a cultural anthropologist, and Damon Lehrer, an artist.