Dear Rice Community,
I am writing to share the unfortunate news of Rice University physicist Marc Robert’s passing. A professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering for 38 years, Marc died peacefully at a local hospital Sept. 2. He was 72.
Colleagues say Marc loved teaching and being with students. That was his true passion. He also thoroughly enjoyed the intellectual and multicultural environment at Rice, and was extremely fond of his research in statistical mechanics.
He used analytical and computational methods to investigate various problems of interfaces, colloidal systems, magnetic phenomena, liquid crystals, carbon nanotubes and other materials and systems. Prior to joining Rice, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Cornell University physical chemist Benjamin Widom.
Marc was born, raised and educated in Switzerland. His mother was an excellent musician as well as his eight siblings, including his late brother George Robert, a jazz saxophone recording artist and founding member of the Jazz Department at Switzerland’s Lausanne Music University.
Marc too loved music, especially jazz, and was described by Rice Magazine in 2014 as “a polymath, who is equally at home teaching and researching thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and quantum field theory as he is playing the piano and pipe organ.”
In addition to his academic and research contributions to Rice, Marc brought several notable speakers to campus in the mid-2000s, including famed Houston heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, French Nobel laureate physicist Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, noted organist and composer Naji Hakim, British mathematician Andrew Wiles, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian human rights activist and attorney.
Marc earned his undergraduate degree in physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and his doctorate in physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
He will be missed by the Rice community, but his memory will live on in those he impacted throughout his career at the university. A celebration of Marc’s life will be held Oct. 1 in Geneva.
Read more about Marc and his accomplishments at Rice in Rice News.
Respectfully,
Howard Hughes Provost Amy Dittmar