Arthur Kerman

From 1953 to 1954, he studied with Robert F. Christy at Caltech under a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, and in 1954 he began a two-year stay at the Niels Bohr Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen.

He became an associate professor in 1960, and the following year, he went on academic leave and was "professeur d'echange" at the University of Paris under a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

In the early 1960s, Kerman traveled with physics professors Sheldon Glashow, then of the University of California at Berkeley and now of Boston University, and Charles Schwartz of Berkeley for a month-long visit as potential members to JASON, a scientific advisory group in Washington, sponsored by the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, among other government groups.

Our 'peaceful' challenge was to examine all available sources, whether classified or not, to assess the potential value of airborne or satellite surveillance of the Soviet Union and to produce a supposedly unclassified document.

Kerman officially retired from MIT after 47 years, and retained the title of professor emeritus from 1999 until his death.

Kerman's research included nuclear and high-energy physics, astrophysics, and the development of advanced particle detectors.

He developed a nucleon-nucleon potential with a soft core that fits nucleon-nucleon scattering data as well as potentials with a hard repulsive core do, which was found to be useful in the study of what is needed beyond scattering data to determine the properties of nuclear matter and finite nuclei.

A long-time resident of Winchester, Massachusetts, Kerman was the husband of Enid Ehrlich for 64 years, with whom he raised five children.