It is with great sadness that we pass along the news that our friend, colleague and Wright Lab community member Richard “Dick” Majka, Ph.D. ‘74 passed away unexpectedly on February 20, 2020. This sudden loss comes as a shock to us all, and the field has lost one of our key hardware experts. More personally, we will miss his presence and often humorous contributions to our wide ranging lunch conversations.
Dick came to Yale as a graduate student, and, apart from a brief stay at LBNL as a Research Scientist, remained at Yale, working first with Jack Sandweiss, and more recently with Helen Caines and John Harris in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Group.
He was always interested and involved in designing and testing new detectors. Early in his career he worked on the first TPC, the SLAC PEP-4 TPC, and the high resolution streamer chamber of E630 at Fermilab. He was also the co-Spokesperson of the E864 and E941 experiments at the Brookhaven AGS.
In 1999 he joined STAR and has been an active participant ever since. He was the STAR Upgrades Chair from 2003-2008 and was still the on-call expert for the GMT.
In ALICE, Dick was the Yale project manager for the EMCal supermodel assembly, and had just seen the successful installation of the TPC’s new inner readout chambers (IROC) of which he was the subsystem project manager. With that project nearing completion, he was increasing his activities in detector R&D discussions for the future Electron Ion Collider.
Outside of Relativistic Heavy Ions, Dick was a long-time collaborator on Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) experiment on the International Space Station and was involved in other projects, including a search for strange quark matter in lunar soil.
Outside of physics, Dick was a fan of the theater, often traveling into New York to attend shows; a supporter of local musicians here in new Haven; and an avid hiker, serving on the Board of Directors for the Sleeping Giant State Park.
He will be deeply missed by everyone. A memorial service will be held next Thursday, February 27 at 10:00 a.m. in the Sloane Physics Laboratory (SPL), room 59, with a reception afterwards in the SPL third floor lounge.
This article was modified from an E-mail of February 21 written by Helen Caines and John Harris.