Alex Becker, Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering, passed away on December 16, 2024. He was 89 years old. Professor Becker was a Polish Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Montreal after World War II. Between 1958 and 1964, he received his B.S., MS., and PhD in Physics from McGill University and did postdoctoral work at the Centre de Recherches Geophysiques in France.
Subsequently, in 1969, he was appointed to the faculty of École Polytechnique in Montreal, where he was managing director of the Mineral Exploration Research Institute and director of research for Questor Surveys. In 1981, Professor Becker joined Engineering Geoscience, the applied geophysics group in the Department of Materials Science and Mineral Engineering (MSME) at Berkeley. In the same year, he was appointed as a faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).
Professor Becker’s research focused on electromagnetic sensors and systems for subsurface mineral, petroleum, geothermal, groundwater, and environmental characterization. He taught numerous graduate classes in electromagnetic methods and an undergraduate class in applied geophysics. Many of his former PhD students are still active in applied geophysics, particularly in mineral and hydrocarbon exploration. Alex was a member of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists.
In 2001, along with other Mineral Engineering faculty, Alex moved to the GeoSystems Engineering group in CEE, where he continued teaching, research, and graduate advising activities until he retired from Berkeley a few years later. He continued doing active research at LBNL into his late 70s, publishing numerous papers on near-surface electromagnetic systems for Unexploded Ordnates (UXO) detection and characterization.