Jens Zorn

Remembering Jens Christian Zorn

Jens C. Zorn, 94, was a physicist, an artist, a teacher, an administrator, a musician, a husband, a father and grandfather. He died at St. Joseph Hospital in the company of his son and daughter early on the morning of Jan. 5, 2026, of a cascading constellation of the maladies of age.

He was born on June 19, 1931 in Halle, Germany, to Max and Alice Zorn. His father was a distinguished mathematician who was active in the Communist opposition to Adolf Hitler. The family fled to the United States in 1934, where Max took faculty positions at Yale University, UCLA and, ultimately, Indiana University.

As a teenager attending University High School in Bloomington, Ind., Jens met Frances Barnhart, a fellow student. They began dating after Jens returned on home leave during a four-year stint in the U.S. Navy after high school graduation, and they married on Jan. 28, 1954 when Jens was an undergraduate at Miami University Ohio.

Jens attended graduate school in physics at Yale University. His son Eric was born in New Haven in 1958. He received his PhD from Yale in 1961 and took a position as an associate professor of physics at the University of Michigan in 1962. His daughter Karen was born in Ann Arbor in 1963.

His research focused on the cooling and trapping of neutral molecules, and his teaching ranged from a course in quantum mechanics that emphasized visual reasoning, to a course on physics of everyday life that made extensive use of hands-on experiments. He was promoted to full professor in 1970 and in 1973 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

At the University he won the Faculty Achievement Award in 1968, the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992 and the Amoco Foundation Faculty Teaching Award in 1994.

Along with two physics department colleagues -- William Williams and Robert Lewis -- and Ford Motor Co. chemist William Pierson, Jens formed a country gospel quartet in 1965 that performed in Ann Arbor coffeehouses, dormitories and assisted living facilities into the 1970s. He continued singing songs from the group’s repertoire with his son, Eric, until a week before he died.

In 1973-74 Jens served as interim director of the University of Michigan’s Residential College and, from 1980-82 he was associate dean of curriculum the University’s college of Literature, Science and the Arts and a university ombudsman.

In 1989, he produced a monograph celebrating the centennial of physics research at Michigan, which began an effort to document and preserve departmental history through photographs and oral histories. That effort continued until just weeks before he died.

In 1992, at the age of 61, Jens chanced into a second career as a sculptor. To honor his late friend and physics department colleague Arthur Rich, who had died in 1990 at the age of 52, Jens fashioned a bronze memorial in the department’s metal shop that symbolized the most important elements of Rich’s research.

“The Short, Rich Life of Positronium” was installed in 1996 in a courtyard to the south of the Harrison M. Randall Laboratory of Physics on the University of Michigan campus. Jens went on to create numerous other permanent installations that symbolized scientific achievements not only at the University of Michigan but also at MIT, Stanford, the University of Nevada, Fisk University, East Carolina University and the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.

Jens formally retired in 2009, but the physics department continued its generous support of his creative efforts in sculpture up until his death.

His hobbies included photography, piano, and guitar, along with recording oral histories of members of the University of Michigan physics department.

Jens was a warm, generous, curious and humble man who was in touch with friends and relatives around the world. He had lively conversations around the dining table about politics, sports, technology, art and social issues until just days before he died.

After his death, friends from near and far sent in their tributes, deploying a range of adjectives to describe him that included kind, engaging, gentle, cheerful, collaborative, gracious, brilliant, caring, insightful, loving, compassionate, empathic, witty, wise, philosophical, welcoming and sincere.

Other tributes called him “a wonderful mentor,” “a precious gem,” “a fine man and a good friend,” “a tall oak supporting our physics department” and a person “I and many others admired for his integrity and his breadth of interests and talents.”

“He was not just a colleague, but a true friend to me and I shall miss miss miss him,” wrote one former member of the department. “There were no limits to his heart or intelligence,” wrote another. “What a privilege to have known him”

A consoling thought is that he died knowing how respected, admired and loved he was. He lived his life in a way to have earned the esteem bestowed upon him.

He is survived by Frances Zorn, his wife of nearly 72 years, his son Eric (Johanna) of Chicago and daughter Karen Zorn of Ann Arbor. He is also survived by three grandchildren -- Alex Zorn of New York CIty and Benjamin Zorn and Annalise Zorn of Chicago -- and his sister Elizabeth Zorn of Spencer, Indiana.

He was preceded in death by his parents, Max and Alice Zorn of Bloomington, Indiana.