Douglas Hamilton

Douglas Hamilton passed away peacefully on Feb. 20, 2024. He was 93 years old. A well-known and respected Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Arizona for 30 years, he also had many interests after retirement, mostly related to his beloved southern Utah and Arizona.

He was born in Canton, OH in 1930 to Everett Hamilton and Janet Proctor Hamilton and married his high school sweetheart Shirley Meyers, also of Canton, in 1953. After he graduated from Case Western Reserve, the couple moved west to Los Angeles where he worked for Hughes Aircraft and received his master's degree from UCLA, under a fellowship from Hughes. They then moved to Redwood City where he worked for General Electric while getting his PhD at Stanford. His graduate advisor was Jim Gibbons, who became a close family friend and went on to become Dean of Engineering and then Provost at Stanford. The paper Doug wrote concerning avalanche diodes became the basis of his PhD dissertation, and was co-authored by Gibbons and William Shockley, who had earlier won the Nobel Prize in Physics for co-inventing the transistor - the basis of all modern computer technology.

Stanford wanted to retain Doug as a faculty member, but he was a desert rat at heart, and in 1959 moved to Tucson where he took a position at the U of A. While at the university, he established the Solid State Engineering Lab in conjunction with Motorola and his colleague Bill Howard, who was a vice-president there. He also co-wrote several textbooks, including "Basic Integrated Circuit Engineering" with Howard which could be found on the shelves of many EE graduates across the industry. His graduate students included Paul Gray, who went on to become Dean of Engineering and then Provost at UC Berkeley (where Doug taught for a year on sabbatical in 1966-67), and Byron McCormick, who headed up the fuel cell car division at General Motors.

In addition to his research, Doug was an outstanding teacher. Among many accolades, he won the creative teaching award from the University of Arizona Foundation in 1978, given to only one faculty member each year. He also anticipated remote learning with a pilot program to video record lectures and make them available to his EE students at any time. He was known for his "demonstration cart" which he wheeled into his classes to show students how the theory he was teaching worked in actual practice. He retired from UA in 1989.

Doug worked hard and played hard. He loved driving his Jeep to explore remote locations and was an early adopter of lightweight backpacking equipment. In the early 60's he and his wife ran Glen Canyon and Cataract Canyon on the Colorado with legendary river guide Ken Sleight before Lake Powell began filling. In 1970, Doug's love of the Utah canyon country inspired him to buy 20 acres of land in the La Sal Mountains outside of Moab. He and his family built a cabin there from the ground up, which his family uses to this day.

After retiring, Doug and Shirley teamed with Howard and his wife Kathy to rephotograph Mesa Verde's archeological ruins and geology 100 years after the Swede Gustaf Nordenskjold had done so. The resulting museum display at the visitor's center was one of their most popular, and Hamilton and Howard again published a book "Photographing Mesa Verde" showing how the park had changed over the 100 year interval. Doug also made a second career researching the conflict between the Apaches, white settlers and the Army, with colleagues including Frank Brito, Dan Aranda, and Berndt Kuhn from Stockholm. This involved finding the exact locations of various conflicts (and sometimes evidence of the event) and photographing them for the historical record.

Doug's first wife, soulmate, and mother of his children, Shirley died in 2002. Doug married Eugenia Slater in 2005, whose daughter, one of his former undergraduate students, had introduced them to each other. He moved to Kearny AZ where he was adopted into the Slater family including Jean's daughters Carla, Cathie and Jeanette, son John, and their children. He became a presence in that community as well.

His children feel incredibly lucky to have won the birth lottery and especially grateful to their father and mother for introducing them to the Arizona-Sonoran Desert, the canyon country of southern Utah, camping and backpacking, classical music, photography, engineering problem solving and countless other things that have enriched their lives.

Survivors include his children Scott (Rachel Bloombaum), Robert and Susan (Greg Hess), brother David, and four grandchildren, along with his wife Jean and her three daughters. The family will hold a private memorial service. Contributions in Doug's memory can be made to the Arizona Historical Society, Community Food Bank of Southern AZ, or UA Opera Theater.