Don Langenberg, Physics and Penn Trustee
Donald (“Don”) Newton Langenberg, former physics professor, LRSM director, vice provost and Penn trustee, died January 25 of an aortic aneurysm at his Dickeyville, Maryland, home. He was 86.
Dr. Langenberg, who was born in Devils Lake, North Dakota, was the son of deaf parents. His father taught printing at the North Dakota School for the Deaf, and his mother was a homemaker. When he was three, he was sent to his Iowa grandparents to learn English, and when he was four, he began school in a one-room schoolhouse. After completing second grade, he returned to Devils Lake, where he graduated in 1949 from Devils Lake High School.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Iowa State College in 1953, his master’s degree in physics in 1955 from UCLA and a PhD in 1959 from the University of California, Berkeley. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford and an NSF fellowship at Berkeley before coming to Penn in 1960 as an assistant professor of physics.
He became a full professor and associate chairman in physics at Penn in 1967, and he served as director of Penn’s Laboratory for Research and the Structure of Matter (LRSM) from 1972 to 1974. He served as vice provost for graduate studies and research from 1974 to 1979 (Almanac May 21, 1974). Dr. Langenberg won both Sloan and Guggenheim fellowships during his time at Penn and was known for his research in superconductivity, especially for precise determination of physical constants of materials at temperatures near absolute zero, which led to development of new international quantum standards of voltage. He served on the University’s Computing Policy Committee in the mid-1970s. He also taught and collaborated at the University of Oxford, the École Normale Supérieure, the California Institute of Technology, and the Technische Universität München.
President Jimmy Carter appointed him deputy director of the National Science Foundation in 1980, a position he held while on leave from Penn. He officially left Penn in 1983 and went on to become chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago and then chancellor of the University System of Maryland. He retired from that position in 2002, at which time he became Chancellor Emeritus.
Dr. Langenberg was awarded an honorary doctorate of science from Penn in 1985, was an overseer of the School of Engineering and Applied Science in the 1980s and served as a trustee for the University 1990-2000. He served on the Trustees’ executive board, and it was his resolution that established a department of emergency medicine in the School of Medicine.
Among his awards, he received the John Price Wetherill Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1975 and the Distinguished Contribution to Research Administration Award of the Society of Research Administrators. He served as president of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and as chair of the National Reading Panel, charged by Congress to study the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children how to read and to report on application of its findings in the classroom and the home.
Dr. Langenberg is survived by his wife, Patricia; children, John, Karen, Julie and Amy; seven grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. March 2 at the University of Maryland Medical School’s Leadership Hall, 655 W. Baltimore St., in Baltimore, Maryland.
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