Edward Kevin Cornell

In Loving Memory
Edward Kevin Cornell, physicist, teacher, woodworker, and gentleman farmer, died on August 31, 2025, in Fairfax, Virginia, from cardiac-related illness. He was 83.
Kevin was born in Manhattan, New York, the youngest of the four children of Julien Davies Cornell and Virginia Stratton Cornell. At the age of four, Kevin contracted polio and lived in a polio ward for several months, a formative experience that would later be vividly evoked for him during the COVID lockdown. Likely sparking his life-long love of animals, Kevin often recalled the family pet goat, who would chase him around the house of their family's farm in Central Valley, New York, and his beloved dog, Penny, who greeted him at the end of the driveway every day after school. Despite significant muscle atrophy in his leg from the polio virus, Kevin played varsity tennis in college and continued playing brutally competitive tennis with his dad and brother on the family court in Central Valley. At various times in his life, Kevin was a skier, a sailor, a jogger, an equestrian, and a cyclist, but always a dominating croquet player.
In high school, Kevin attended Putney School in Vermont, where he spent winters cross-country skiing, working in the woodshop, and tapping maple trees. One summer Kevin worked on a chicken farm and would joke that he was a "left-wing chicken Plucker." It was also at Putney where Kevin met his first wife, Nina Wilson. After high school, Kevin matriculated to university at his parents' alma mater, Swarthmore College, where he completed a bachelor's degree in mathematics. At Swarthmore, Kevin also reached his peak skills as a musician on the banjo and guitar. His repertoire consisted mostly of Pete Seeger songs, but he was talented enough to woo Nina back after a short breakup by serenading her outside her dorm window. Kevin and Nina married in 1963 at the Cambridge Friends Meetinghouse in Massachusetts and then moved for both to pursue doctoral degrees at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Kevin studied alkaline earth metals and in 1969 defended his physics dissertation, "Spin-flip scattering of conduction electrons from impurities in molten sodium.
Kevin and Nina moved to Detroit for Kevin's postdoctoral fellowship at Wayne State University and his oldest child, Emily, was born. Kevin and Nina then moved to Washington, DC, and welcomed their second child, Jen. In DC, Kevin first worked as an assistant professor in physics at American University before accepting a Congressional Science Fellowship in 1975 with Senator Gary Hart. After the fellowship ended, Kevin stayed on as a senior staff member advising the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment on nuclear regulatory oversight and legislation, and met his second wife, Andrea Dravo, his counterpart in the House. In 1979, Kevin moved to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as the Deputy Executive Director of Operations. His first major role was to lead the investigation into the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident which, in his telling, unfolded on his second day. After the NRC, Kevin returned to American University to head Development and Alumni Relations and would subsequently hold similar roles at Grinnell College and George Washington University. In 1981, Kevin and Andrea married in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They had two children, Portia and Ed, and lived in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of DC. They were known for hosting great dinner and holiday parties with a close-knit group of neighbors, and they spent many weekends at their small horse farm in Virginia. They later moved to Bethesda, MD.
Kevin met his third wife, Pat Appel (nee Dennis), when they worked together in the development office at George Washington University. One of their first dates was to shop for furniture at an estate sale, where they bought a 7-foot-tall wooden giraffe (transported home through the car's sunroof) that would become a central part of a whimsical collection of wooden animals. Pat and Kevin bought Riley Farm, a waterfront property and 18th century farmhouse in Galena, Maryland, where they married in September 2001. Kevin built himself a 600-square-foot wood shop, where he renewed his hobby of crafting bowls on a wood lathe and making furniture, including tables, cabinets, and elaborate countertops. He loved to ride his tractor (sometimes without purpose) and planted raspberry canes and fields of wildflowers that inspired passing motorists in late summer to pull over and take photographs of the picturesque red barn and colorful fields. Pat and Kevin loved entertaining guests at the farm by taking them out tubing behind a motorboat on the Sassafras River in warmer months and hosting large Thanksgiving dinners featuring both smoked and roasted turkeys. In colder weather, Kevin loved to sit in front of a wood fire with a dog at his feet and read mass-market spy novels. Overnight visitors could expect to be awakened by the smell of sizzling bacon and the sound of Vivaldi playing at deafening levels, often prompting family members to beg him to turn down the volume.
In 2005, Kevin discovered his true calling, teaching high school physics at Georgetown Day School. Kevin taught advanced-placement physics and statistics and advised the robotics club and science bowl team. He was known by his colleagues for his direct style and lighthearted hijinks (such as handing out diplomas wearing a gorilla mask), and beloved by his students for introducing interactive labs and creative classroom approaches to spark their love of physics. Whether it was shooting liquid-nitrogen-powered bottle rockets in the school parking lot, throwing candy to students to spur participation in lectures, or designing physics problems in which his beagle, Daisy, rode a skateboard off an airplane, Kevin approached teaching with constant creativity and renewed love of the classroom. Kevin and a colleague ambitiously designed and taught a new college-level course in quantum mechanics that students clamored to take and found devilishly difficult. Kevin retired from teaching in 2019 at the age of 78.
To properly remember Kevin is to recall the constant presence of a dog at his side. Notable canines were Denis, the genderbending black Newfoundland mix with an incorrigible sweet tooth; Mo, the witless Irish Setter who harried the zookeepers at the National Zoo; Hightail, the loyal golden retriever that Kevin gave as a gift to his mother, and adopted when she became too old to care for him; Bailey, the enormous lumbering Newfoundland who let all the grandchildren climb on his back; and lastly, Missy, the rescue dog who Kevin could only see as gentle and loving, despite the muzzle she was required to wear around any visitors.
Kevin will also be remembered by his family for his ever-present (and often repetitive) sense of humor; his terrible dance moves at family weddings; his insistence on McDonald's "fresh brewed" diet coke; his love of movies but failure to remember any of them; his firm belief that he could fix or build almost anything and questionable safety protocols while doing so; his rhubarb pie and (barely) rare steak; his cantankerous backseat driving; his faithful use of encrypted passwords; doing Bad Santa first; and his inability to ever call his children by the correct name. After an austere childhood, facing a debilitating and isolating illness, Kevin's heart worked overtime to be a different father to his family than his own had been to him. It was only fitting that it was his heart that finally asked for rest.
A memorial in honor of Kevin's life will be held on October 4, 2025, at 3PM with a reception to follow from 4 to 6PM, at the Friends Meeting of Washington, 2111 Decatur Pl NW, Washington, DC 20008. Attendees are welcomed to wear a pink shirt in homage to Kevin's unflagging, sartorial belief that it was the color of "real men." And in lieu of flowers, think of Kevin each time you wear pink.
Kevin is survived by his wife, Pat Cornell; his children, Emily Weiss, Jen Cornell, Portia Cornell, Ed Cornell, and stepdaughter Emily Appel-Newby; grandchildren, Mckinley, Cassie, Emmett, Cal, Eli, Jack, Danny, Kit, and Timmy; his elder sister, Sheila Lunke; and numerous nieces and nephews, who refer to him as the "fun one" of his generation.