Eldon Earl Ferguson

1926 - 2017

Eldon Earl Ferguson, a renowned scientist and longtime resident of Boulder, died on 26 April 2017 in Paris, France. He was born on 23 April 1926 in Rawlins, Wyoming to George E. and Bess A. (Pierce) Ferguson. When he was about three years old the family moved to Oklahoma, where Eldon grew up and attended public schools in Tulsa. He was a state champion track star and entered the University of Oklahoma on an athletic scholarship. There he earned BS, MS and PhD degrees in physics and after graduating in 1953 he worked for a short time at Phillips Petroleum in Oklahoma and at the Naval Research Labs in Washington, DC. Eldon married Mary June Gaines. They had two children, Jill and Mark, and were later divorced. In 1981 he married Marie L. (LeJedec) Durup, a French physicist. In 1957 Eldon joined the faculty of the University of Texas in Austin doing research on chemical and physical processes in ionized gases. Seeking a promotion, he was advised to give lectures and one that he delivered at the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Boulder, Colorado led to a job offer, which he accepted in 1962. The lab had a research program concerning the interactions of charged particles, electrons and ions, in the upper atmosphere. These particles control the propagation of radio waves through the atmosphere. Starting a research group, he hired his two best students from the University of Texas, Art Schmeltekopf and Fred Fehsenfeld. They soon designed and built a new instrument called a flowing afterglow that revolutionized the laboratory study of ionic reactions. The device offered unprecedented flexibility and accuracy to measure the important reactions of ions with a wide variety of atmospheric trace gases including atoms, metal vapors, and unstable species. Its versatility has led to researchers from around the world adapting the technology to a wide variety of research fields ranging from medical analysis to interstellar chemistry. In a short time Eldon became the director of his research division, the Aeronomy Laboratory, which was initially formed around his group's research. In 1966 the lab was moved from NBS into the newly created Environmental Science Services Administration and in 1970 into the present National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In the mid-1970s the research emphasis began to evolve to topics related to environmental issues such as stratospheric ozone depletion, acid precipitation and air pollution. He built and managed a world-class organization with leading research programs in the measurement of atmospheric trace gases, laboratory analysis of chemical reactions and model simulations of the atmosphere. Much of the laboratory's success was based upon their development of new instruments for critical measurements. The laboratory also played a central role in shaping international environmental policy, such as the Montreal Protocol, which eliminated the use of ozone depleting chlorofluorocarbons. In 1986 he retired from NOAA and took a position as a Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Orsay, France. After four years he returned to Boulder and served as the Director of the NOAA Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory (CMDL); in 1996 he retired. Eldon loved the Colorado lifestyle and was an avid hiker, runner and skier for many years. During his time in Boulder, he was an Adjoint Professor in the Department of Chemistry, where he taught, trained graduate students and helped recruit outstanding faculty. Throughout his career he maintained a strong interest in ion reactions and had many other affiliations and collaborations with scientists and laboratories around the world. His research and administrative skills were recognized with numerous awards, including from the US Department of Commerce, a Presidential Rank Meritorious Executive Award and two Gold Medals, the Will Allis Prize from the American Physical Society, the Schrödinger Prize from the Austrian Symposium on Atomic and Surface Physics, a Guggenheim Fellowship from the Max-Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, and a Humboldt Fellowship from the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg. Eldon was predeceased by his brother Kenneth Ferguson. He is survived by beloved wife, Marie Ferguson; his daughter, Jill Ferguson, granddaughters, Marisa Wilson and Darien Reed, and great-grandson, August Wilson; his son, Mark Ferguson, and grandson, Matthew Ferguson; and step-daughters, Juliet Rouillon, Florence Durup and Sylvie Carré.