Jan H van der Merwe

The Frank–Van der Merwe crystal growth model carries his name and he was awarded numerous South African academic prizes.

During his formative years the family moved between present day Outjo and Gobabis and finally settled in Otjiwarongo, where he first attended an actual primary school.

During his time in Bristol he befriended several people who went on to become noted physicists including C. F. Powell, Arthur Tyndall and Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf.

During this period he again worked with a colleague from Bristol, Frank Nabarro who was then head of Physics at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

In 1961 he took a sabbatical to the University of Virginia which led to a refinement of his initial model of thickening two-dimensional interfaces in 1963.

With the advance of the semiconductor industry from the 1960s onward, epitaxy became extremely important as it depends on the growth of perfect single crystals for the manufacturing of transistors and IC circuits.

[7] In 1965, he was invited by an ex-CSIR colleague, Ernst Marais, to the University of Port Elizabeth where he was appointed head of the applied mathematics department.

During this period Van der Merwe was invited to present plenary talks at many international conferences, during which he made enduring friendships with several surface scientists including Ernst G. Bauer of the Technical University of Clausthal-Zellerfeld and Ralf Vanselow of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

The Materials Research Society published a Focus Issue titled "Jan van der Merwe: Epitaxy and the Computer Age" in November 2017.

[10] In 1947, just before leaving South Africa for Bristol, he married Minnie de Villiers and they had their honeymoon on the ship to the UK.