RICHARD S. STEIN (1925-2021)

BY CHRISTOPHER K. OBER AND PETER GREEN

RICHARD STEPHEN STEIN, the Emeritus Charles A. Goessmann Professor in Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, died on June 21, 2021, at age 95.

Dick was born on Aug. 21, 1925, to Isador and Florence Lewengood Stein in Far Rockaway, New York, and grew up on Long Island. He was destined for a more trade-focused education until he received admission to Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, which at the time was a hotbed of polymer science in North America. As an undergraduate there, he became interested in the new field of polymers, worked with Bruno Zimm (NAS 1958), inventor of the Zimm plot used in light-scattering studies, and was involved in early measurements of the size of a polymer molecule in solution using light scattering. Dick graduated from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1945 and subsequently obtained his M.Sc. (1948) and his Ph.D. (1949) from Princeton University, working first with Henry Eyring (NAS 1945), who left Princeton for the University of Utah, and subsequently with Eyring’s student, Arthur Tobolsky.

For his graduate studies, he used birefringence as a tool to study oriented polymers. His first observations were made on amorphous polymers. He then focused on polyethylene, a relatively new and, at the time, increasingly important commercial polymer. He soon investigated this same polymer system and conducted early X-ray experiments on oriented polymers. During his postdoctoral year with Sir Gordon Sutherland at Cambridge University he initiated studies of the orientation of solid polymers using infrared dichroism. He was among the first to show that the infrared doublet at 720/730 cm-1 can be used to establish the degree of crystallinity of solid polyethylene.

Following additional postdoctoral work at Princeton, in 1950 Dick moved to UMass Amherst, where he became a faculty member in the chemistry department. He is noted for his work using optical, neutron, and X-ray methods to characterize polymers, including small-angle and wide-angle light scattering, both small-angle neutron and X-ray scattering, wide-angle X-ray diffraction, and birefringence and infrared dichroism, to study structure formation and deformation of polymers. Specific types of polymers studied include amorphous and semi-crystalline polymers as well as polymer blends. Dick developed and described the fundamental theory of light scattering by spherulitic and other structures in solid polymer films in a series of papers published in the early 1960s in the Journal of Applied Physics, demonstrating quantitative agreement between his theory and experiment and helping to explain the kinetics of crystal growth. These studies later became the basis of a series of experiments performed in graduate lab courses at UMass Amherst in the 1980s.

Dick also carried out pioneering studies using neutron scattering when it became available in the early 1970s. He was early to apply this new method to the deformation behavior of polymer chains, which greatly improved the basic understanding of both the melt and solid-state structures of polymers. He and his group used the same technique to study phase separation in polymer blends in the early 1980s. Concurrently, his group applied small-angle X-ray scattering to study the internal morphology of spherulites and the crystalline/amorphous interfaces in miscible blends containing a crystallizable component.

Dick is one of very few individuals to be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences (1990), the National Academy of Engineering (1991), and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1992). Previously he received the Bingham Medal from the Society of Rheology in 1972, the Polymer Physics Award of the American Physical Society in 1976 for “his pioneering optical and x-ray studies of structure and deformation in solid polymers under equilibrium and dynamic conditions,” the American Chemical Society Award in Polymer Chemistry in 1979, and the Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Polymer Science of the Society of Polymer Science of Japan in 1988. Inducted into the Plastics Hall of Fame in 1996, Dick was chosen for his innovative research and his dedication to his students. In 1999, the Materials Research Society conferred on him its highest honor, the Von Hippel Award. In 2014 Dick was presented with a certificate of Congressional Recognition for his outstanding service to UMass Amherst and to the community, and in 2015 he was presented with an official Joint House Senate resolution recognizing his many accomplishments and contributions to the Commonwealth.

Dick played a preeminent role in founding the Polymer Science & Engineering Department at UMass Amherst. He initially formed the Polymer Research Institute of UMass in 1961 to coordinate the polymer efforts occurring in the various departments on campus. In 1966, he and others proposed the formation of the Polymer Science and Engineering Department, which consisted of about 12 faculty members and 150 researchers (mostly graduate students and postdocs). Dick was also a very entertaining lecturer, whose classes described in rich detail many of the topics he had pioneered. He could lecture from memory. To capture the many aspects and bountiful details of his lectures, students often compared and combined notes, going so far as to record his lectures for later transcription. Many UMass Amherst visitors have wonderful memories of time spent with Dick and his family at their summer house on Lake Wyola. It was not only an additional opportunity for his students to discuss the amorphous and crystalline state of polymers, but also a special opportunity to meet in a casual atmosphere many of the world’s top polymer scientists.

Dick is survived by his children Anne Stein and husband Monty Kroopkin of San Diego, California; Carol Avonti and husband Steve of West Springfield, Massachusetts; Lisa Lesure and husband Walter of Amherst; son-in-law Darrel Rost of Pittsfield, Massachusetts; six grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and many nieces, nephews, and extended family. He was predeceased by his wife Judith (née Balise) Stein, his sister Marge Manheimer, and his daughter Linda Rost.