Professor and nuclear chemist Heino Nitsche has died at 64

Heino Nitsche has died

July 17, 2014

Chemistry Professor Heino Nitsche.

Chemistry professor Heino Nitsche died unexpectedly and peacefully in his sleep at his home in Oakland early in the morning of Tuesday, July 15. He was 64 years old.

Nitsche was born July 24, 1949, in Munich, Germany. Born four years after the end of World War II, Nitsche came of age as the success of the Marshall Plan was helping to lift Europe out of its post-war poverty. His mother was a homemaker and his father an electrical engineer who worked for Rohde and Schwarz, an electronic instrumentation company that is still headquartered in Munich.

Nitsche attended high school at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich and graduated in the spring of 1968. At first Nitsche enrolled in a university close to home, the Universitt Erlangen Nrnberg, about 100 miles to the north of Munich. He transferred to the Freie Universitt Berlin in the spring of 1969, bringing with him the interest in chemistry he had developed the previous semester. Nitsche completed his chemistry B.S. in 1976.

As a graduate student, Nitsche studied nuclear chemistry and electrochemistry and performed experiments on the conductivity of uranium. He wrote his dissertation on the transference numbers of neptunium in less than four years and earned his Ph.D. in 1980.

In September 1980, Nitsche arrived at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for a one-year staff scientist appointment. Nitsches stay at LBNL lasted much longer than he expected. By 1984 he was a lab investigator with his own research group. Nitsches early research focused on the environmental chemistry of actinides but later grew to include the search for new heavy elements.

In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, leading to Germanys reunification. That year was prominent for Nitsche for another reasonthat year he married Martha Boccalini. Four years later, in 1993, the couple left Berkeley and moved to Germany, where Nitsche had a new appointment as the head of Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (Dresden-Rossendorf Research Center).

Nitsche assumed the directorship of the centers Institute of Radiochemistry. He also became a full professor of radiochemistry at the Technische Universitt, Dresden, now the largest technical university in Germany.

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Professor and nuclear chemist Heino Nitsche has died at 64