Herb Strauss, professor emeritus of chemistry, has died at 78

Emeritus chemistry professor Herb Strauss has died at 78

December 22, 2014

Emeritus Professor of Chemistry Herbert Herb Leopold Strauss

Emeritus Professor of Chemistry Herbert Herb Leopold Strauss died at home in Berkeley on December 2, after a long illness. He was 78.

Strauss was an internationally recognized spectroscopist who studied the rotational and vibrational properties of molecules. Although he officially retired in 2003, he remained active on campus as a professor of the graduate school. He taught his last class, a graduate seminar, three weeks before his death.

Strauss was born in 1936 in Aachen, Germany, to Joan and Charles Strauss. With the help of relatives in England, the family, including Strausss younger brother, Walter, escaped Nazi Germany for England in 1939. After a harrowing year in London, during which Strauss almost died from bronchitis, the family was able to immigrate to the United States.

The family lived in a small apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York. Strausss father worked as a real estate agent, and his mother as a saleswoman in a clothing store. Although not wealthy, the family was a loving and supportive one that placed great emphasis on education.

Strauss studied chemistry as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student at Columbia University in New York City. In 1957 he met his future wife, Carolyn North Cooper, on a blind date at the Christmas Eve midnight mass of a Manhattan church. Both Herb and Carolyn were Jewish, so meeting at a church was an irony that they both enjoyed. They were married about the time Strauss finished his Ph.D. in 1960 with George Frankel, and the newlyweds spent a happy year in Oxford as Herb carried out postdoctoral studies there.

Strauss joined the Berkeley chemistry faculty in 1961, where he spent his entire professional career. Using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, he explored properties of a variety of molecules, especially n-alkanes with lengths of 5 to 40 carbon atoms. He also used Raman and neutron spectroscopy to study the rotations and vibrations of molecular hydrogen embedded in various systems, including ice and zeolites.

He received the Bomem-Michelson Prize for Spectroscopy in 1994. He also received the Lippincott Award for Vibrational Spectroscopy the same year for three decades of elucidating the complex dynamics of large molecules in condensed phases.

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Herb Strauss, professor emeritus of chemistry, has died at 78