Norbert Thonnard, 71, of Oak Ridge, passed away peacefully, surrounded by his family, on Thursday, November 20, after a valiant battle with cancer.

Norbert was born in Berlin, Germany, on January 22, 1943, to the late Ernst and Constanza Thonnard. At age three, he moved with his parents and two sisters to Barenquilla, Colombia. His family immigrated to the United States when Norbert was 14. They lived in Tallahassee, Florida, and he attended Florida State University, where he met the love of life, Roslyn Oglesby.

Norbert received his PhD in physics from the University of Kentucky in 1970. He spent 13 years at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. In 1983, he and his family moved to Oak Ridge, where he worked at Atom Sciences Inc., a high-tech spin-off of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee in 1993 and founded the Institute for Rare Isotope Measurements. [Read more…]