Alfred George Duba

Alfred George Duba died Aug. 21. He was 83.

Duba was born on Jan. 26, 1940, to Frank and Erma Duba, of Braeholm, West Virginia. He graduated in 1958 from Man High School as the valedictorian. He subsequently enlisted in the U. S. Army as a personnel clerk, he was posted to Heidelberg, Germany. He attended Marshall University, where he received his bachelor of science in physics. While at Marshall University, he worked as the AP clerk at Campbell Huntington Hospital. He graduated magna cum laude in 1966, and that same year he entered the graduate program in geophysics at the University of Chicago. Finishing his doctor of philosophy on the electrical conductivity of olivine, he benefited from a research stay at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), an NSF fellowship at Harvard, and a Fulbright scholarship to the Australian National University in Canberra. From 1972, he was employed as a research scientist at LLNL, where he ran experiments exploring how the earth behaved at high pressure and high temperature and served various leadership roles. From 1991 to 1995, he chaired the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy’s Working Group on Electromagnetic Induction, and in 1997, he was named Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. He also held visiting professorships at the University of Utrecht, the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris, the Bayerisches Geoinstitut at the University of Beyreuth. In 2002, he retired from LLNL to return to West Virginia. For the next six years, he worked full time in the earth and planetary sciences department at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

He is survived by his wife of 59 years, Lucille; his sisters Patricia, Karen, Rose, Shirley, and Regina, his brother Woodrow, two sons, William, and Charles, and two grandchildren, Hiro and Sayaka. He was preceded by his brothers Melvin, James, Stanley, and Franklin, his sisters Joyce and Shirley, and his oldest son, Frank.