September 21, 2015
Ian D. Hutcheon, Deputy Director of the Glenn Seaborg Institute and Group Leader of the Chemical and Isotopic Signatures Group in Nuclear and Chemical Sciences Division in the Physical and Life Sciences (PLS) Directorate of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, passed away March 26, 2015. He was 67 years old.
Hutcheon earned his PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. His expertise with the ion probe began to develop at the University of Chicago when he worked with Joe Smith and then expanded further when he moved to Cal Tech in 1983 to work with Jerry Wasserburg on the applications of secondary ion mass spectrometry to cosmochemistry. He moved to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1993.
Hutcheon made numerous contributions to the study of the isotopic composition of meteorites and what they reveal about the evolution of the early solar system. He was also a key developer of nuclear forensics as both a field of scientific investigation and a scientific discipline with significant applications to national security. He conducted groundbreaking work in the formation mechanisms of planets and meteorites, diffusion transport processes in terrestrial and planetary melts, glasses and minerals; and conducted the first NanoSIMS-enabled studies of biological materials. He authored over 200 papers and book chapters, and co-wrote the textbook, Nuclear Forensics Analysis with colleagues Pat Grant and Ken Moody.
His awards in recent years included being named, in 2013, a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at the Laboratory; receiving the Physical and Life Sciences Outstanding Post-doc Mentor award in 2010; and having a newly discovered mineral in the Allende meteorite named in his honor, Hutcheonite. He was named a Fellow of the Meteoritical Society in 1986.
In his 22 years at LLNL, he built the Chemical and Isotopic Signatures Group from himself and 2 others and one secondary ion mass spectrometer to 38 scientists, post-docs, graduate students and technicians. The breadth of study within the members of his group includes time scale and processes of nucleosynthesis; formation and evolution of meteorites and planets; mineralogy and petrology of unequilibrated meteorites; sub-cellular imaging of biological samples and isotope tracing into cells of all types; environmental microbiology; nuclear forensics and attribution.
In recent years Hutcheon and members of his group were involved in establishing collaborations with colleagues at analytical facilities in South Africa, Canada, the UK, and with the IAEA, to help encourage nuclear forensics efforts.
Ian Hutcheon is survived by his wife of 41 years, Nancy Hutcheon, former Education Coordinator for summer internships in PLS, his children, Douglass Hutcheon and Dana Gordon, and hundreds of colleagues in the US and abroad, that he mentored and inspired to scientific excellence.
Nancy Hutcheon