Professor Emeritus
About
Remembering John C. (Jack) van der Velde
John C. (Jack) van der Velde passed away peacefully in his sleep on January 18, 2026, at the age of 95. He was born in Grand Rapids and grew up in Holland, Michigan. He attended Hope College, where he studied physics, and played football and tennis. He and Hope classmate Marilyn Veldman married in 1953 while pursuing graduate studies at the U of M, and stayed to make Ann Arbor their home, enjoying 72 years of marriage and raising three children.
Jack received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan in 1953 and 1958, respectively. He joined the faculty in 1958 and became a full professor in 1968. He performed research in particle physics, and also taught and mentored UM undergraduate and graduate students. He helped design multiple large bubble chambers, for experiments at the Argonne National Lab and Fermilab. In the 1980s, he was a co-director of the Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven (IMB) collaboration, building a 10,000 cubic meter water Cherenkov detector, the first of its kind, in a salt mine near Cleveland, to search for proton decay. The IMB experiment established important lower limits to the proton lifetime. In February 1987, the IMB detector observed neutrino signals from the 1987A Supernova - also a first. This detection was the first observation of anything other than electromagnetic radiation from a source outside the solar system, and gave the first experimental confirmation of the theory of supernova production and stellar collapse. Thanks to this discovery, Jack and his IMB colleagues won the Rossi Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1989.
Jack and Marilyn spent four sabbaticals in Paris, and loved to travel the world with family and friends. He planned many trips for his family, who are all so grateful for having had the opportunity to explore many wonderful places. He was active at First Presbyterian Church and in the Ann Arbor tennis community; his favorite hobbies included fly-fishing and windsurfing, expanding on the sailing experiences he had growing up on Lake Michigan. He was known for his good nature and his sense of humor, which he retained to the end of his life.
Jack was preceded in death by his parents, Otto and Margaret Den Herder van der Velde, and by his sister JoAnne and her husband Jim Brooks. He is survived by his wife Marilyn, his children Mary van der Velde, Alison (Greg) Holcombe, and Jon van der Velde, his six grandchildren Anneke (Cory), Jay (Marc), Schuyler (Drew), Nina (Cecily), Luca (Zuza) and Andrew; two great-grandchildren Otto and Lorna, and his nieces and nephews and their families.
Field(s) of Study
