Glenn Bateman
Died August 5, 2011
Glenn prepared for Yale at Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, NY, and majored in physics and mathematics. He resided in Branford. Glenn was the founder of the Undergraduate Physics Society and the winner in both 1961 and 1962 of the Barge Math Competition. He also earned numerals in fencing and was active in Branford’s social committee as well as the Mathematics Club, serving as its treasurer in our junior year.
After Yale Glenn continued his studies at Princeton, earning a Ph.D. in astrophysics in 1970; his thesis dissertation was entitled “Kinetic Theory of a Plasma in a Small Electric Field.”
During 1979, Dr. Bateman became a visiting associate professor in the School of Nuclear Engineering & Health Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was promoted to professor in 1980 and remained until September, 1984. He was a prolific researcher and writer. Papers of Dr. Bateman’s published while he was at Georgia Tech included “Inductive Effects in Fluxconserving Tokamaks,” Physics of Fluids 22, 354 (1979), “Perturbed Magnetic Field Phase Slip for Tokamaks,” Nuclear Fusion 20, 17 (1980),
“Saturated Tearning Modes in Toroidal Geometry,” Physics of Fluids 29, 753 (1986), and “Lie Group Analysis for a Multispecies, Spatially Inhomogeneous, Mutually Interacting Gas Mixture,”Transport Theory and Statistical Physics 21, 119 (1992). Dr. Bateman also worked with Dr. Weston Stacey on the IAEA INTOR Workshop project while at Georgia Tech. After Georgia Tech, Dr. Bateman continued his research at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory.
Dr. Bateman later worked at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, for 15 years, first as a research associate, investigating problems related to electron cyclotron heating and current drive and evolution of heated Tokomak plasmas. There he was promoted to senior research scientist in 2007. At Lehigh, Dr. Bateman also taught courses on numerical analysis, C++ and plasma physics. In 2007, he was a member of the Status of Physics Components Panel of the Simulation Project, a workshop sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy in Rockville, MD.
Glenn passed away on August 5, 2011, survived by his wife, Colleen, sons Timothy and Peter, daughter-in-law Geana, and grandchildren Sydney and Nathaniel.
Weston M. Stacey, Regents’ Prof. of Nuclear Engineering, Georgia Tech, remembers Glenn Bateman: “I met Glenn at Oak Ridge in the late 1970s when I was looking for a second fusion faculty member for our (Nuclear Engineering) Dept. at Georgia Tech, and we worked together for the next several years building a small program into a pretty good one. Glenn made a real effort to know the students, and they responded to him accordingly. He developed and taught a couple of courses, one of them based on his recently published book Magnetohyrdodynamic Instabilities (which went on to become a minor classic in the field).” Glenn left for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in the early 1980s, where he stayed for a few years before moving to the Physics Dept. at Lehigh University, where he spent the remainder of his professional life. I maintained a friendship with Glenn until his death, seeing him at the yearly meetings of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics, where we would always talk about physics and how life was going. The last time we talked, he told me that he wasn’t going to make the next meeting so he would tell me goodbye then. All of us in the field of fusion plasma physics feel the loss of a valued and well-liked colleague.”
Glenn’s voice-mail at Lehigh is still active; Glenn asks callers to leave a message but the mailbox is full.