George Wallerstein ’51

George Wallerstein ’51, of Seattle; May 13. He partook in Brown’s Naval ROTC and served as a junior officer on a ship during the Korean War. He did graduate work at the California Institute of Technology and later joined the faculty at UC Berkeley. In 1965, the University of Washington invited him to be the chair of the astronomy department, a position that he occupied until 1980. In the early 1970s he was instrumental in obtaining funding for a research telescope on Manastash Ridge, which still operates today. Over the years, he conducted research at many institutions and observatories, including the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Munich, and Uppsala University. In 2000, he was awarded the American Astronomical Society’s Henry Norris Russell Prize for a lifetime of distinguished research. He was also elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received an honorary degree from Tougaloo College. He spent three months on the Greenland Ice Cap and a summer doing research on glaciers in Alaska. He enjoyed meteorology and taught a basic meteorology course at UW, where he won the weather prediction contest in the UW Department of Atmospheric Sciences several times. He was a distinguished mountaineer with many first ascents in California, Alaska, and Greenland. A longtime member of the American and Canadian mountain clubs, he was honored as a Pioneer of St. Elias. He supported organizations such as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the United Negro College Fund, Tougaloo College, Morehouse College, Planned Parenthood, and the Nature Conservancy. He is survived by his wife, Julie Lutz; two stepdaughters and their spouses; a sister; six step-grandchildren, including Emile Blouin ’16; a niece; and three nephews.