David Fox

Professor David Fox received his B.A. in Mathematics and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley.  He taught in the Physics Department of the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) in Israel for four years and in the Institute of Optics and the Physics Department of the University of Rochester for three.  In 1959, he moved to the newly created Physics Department of what was then known as the College on Long Island of the State University of New York (and later, briefly, as SUNY on Long Island), located at Oyster Bay.  At the time of his arrival, the institution had about 60 faculty members and a few hundred students.  The photo below (courtesy of Edwin McCullough, class of 1964) shows David teaching a class at Oyster Bay.

In 1962, the college moved, became a university, and changed its name to SUNY at Stony Brook.  David was active in the development of the graduate program.  He served as Dean of the Graduate School from 1963 to 1966, resigning the position in 1966 to return to the Physics Department, where he was engaged in teaching and research.  He was the department Graduate Program Director for many years.  Upon his retirement in 1984, the "David Fox Prize" was established to honor his many years of exceptional service, as an endowment held by the Stony Brook Foundation.  The prize is awarded annually to the graduate Teaching Assistant deemed most outstanding.  David retired from the University in 1992.

His principle field of research was solid state theory, primarily on properties of molecular crystals.  He has also worked on random matrix theory and on energy storage problems.  Some of the research was done during sabbaticals in Japan, Israel, and Portugal.

Sadly, we have lost our friend and colleague to heart failure on May 2, 1999.
 

The following obituary was taken from New York Times.
May 10, 1999, Monday
Metropolitan Desk

Dr. David Fox, 78, a Physicist Blacklisted in the McCarthy Era

By NICK RAVO
Dr. David Fox, a physicist who was blacklisted and indicted for contempt when he refused to testify fully before the House Un-American Activities Committee at the dawn of what would become known as the McCarthy era, died last Monday at New York University Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 78 and lived in Setauket, N.Y.

The cause was heart failure, said his daughter, Margalit Fox of Manhattan.

Mr. Fox, who was born in Brooklyn, received bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from the University of California at Berkeley.

While working on his Ph.D., in 1949, Dr. Fox, a Communist sympathizer, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee but declined to answer all of the questions, citing his Fifth Amendment right to protect himself from self-incrimination. The refusal resulted in Dr. Fox's losing his teaching assistant post, even though he had signed an oath pledging allegiance to the United States. It also effectively kept him from being employed as a physicist in the United States after he received his doctorate in 1951.

Dr. Fox, who was later acquitted of his contempt charge after the Supreme Court clarified its position on the Fifth Amendment in 1951, then taught at Haifa Technion in Israel for four years. In 1956, he won a teaching position at the University of Rochester, moving three years later to the College of Long Island of the State University in Oyster Bay, N.Y. He stayed at the school, which moved to Stony Brook and changed its name to the State University at Stony Brook, until retiring in 1991.

Dr. Fox, whose expertise was in solid state theory, was also the first dean at the graduate school at Stony Brook.

Besides his daughter, Margalit, an editor with The New York Times Book Review, he is survived by his wife, the former Laura Garfield; two other daughters, Robin Fox of Portland, Ore., and Erica Fox of Pusan, South Korea, and one grandchild.
 

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Last Updated: August 31, 1999