In Memorium: Steven Anthony Marino, Sr. 1946 - 2024
Steve Marino passed away unexpectedly on January 4th 2024 at the age of 77.
Steve was born in Brooklyn, New York, the oldest of four boys and four girls. After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1968, Steve worked with Victor Bond and Harald Rossi at the Radiological Research Accelerator Facility (RARAF) at its original location at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He quickly became the to go-to guy for accurate dosimetry of RARAF’s monoenergetic neutrons.
When RARAF moved to Columbia University in 1980, Steve moved with it, and was instrumental in dismantling the accelerator at Brookhaven and reinstalling it at the Radiological Research Laboratory (now the Center for Radiological Research) at Columbia’s Nevis Facility in Irvington, New York. Under his watchful eye, and together with Gerhard Randers-Pehrson, RARAF gradually morphed from being a neutron facility to becoming a neutron / charged-particle facility, and more recently to a neutron / charged-particle / microbeam facility.
RARAF had and has always been a biology-friendly facility both for Columbia and for outside radiobiologists - and the radiobiologist’s “friend” at RARAF was Steve! He was dedicated to providing good dosimetry and to providing an environment in which the visiting biologist’s experiments actually got done - while all the time regaling the visitors with stories of Brookhaven, Los Alamos, Columbia, and then perhaps Brookhaven again!
In 1989, Steve was appointed Facilities Manager of RARAF, a title that he held until his retirement in January 2015. To all of Steve’s colleagues and friends, he was the consummate anchor, whether running the day-to-day accelerator experiments or being the team captain of the tug-of-war game at the CRR annual picnic. He was always friendly and supportive while at the same time engaging in conversations on every topic relating to particle accelerators, to neutron dosimetry, to space research, or to the world as a whole.
Steve is survived by his wife Christine, his four children, Stephen Jr., Matthew, Christopher and Jessica, his two grandchildren and his siblings, Kenneth, Anita, Nancy, Thomas, Teresa, Daniel and Loretta. He was a one of a kind, a good scientist and a good person, and he will be deeply missed by everyone whose path he crossed at RARAF, at the Radiation Research Society Annual meetings, and particularly by his long-standing colleagues and friends at Columbia.
David Brenner, Tom Hei, Sally Amundson, Guy Garty
and all of Steve’s friends and colleagues at the CRR