Physicist James Keck was born June 11, 1924 and entered Cornell University in 1942, majoring in physics and mathematics. In 1944 he was drafted into the Special Engineering Detachment of the U.S. Army, and sent to Los Alamos to work on the atomic bomb part of the Manhattan Project. At Los Alamos he met Margaret Ramsey, one of the few women scientists employed on the Manhattan Project, which she joined in 1945. He left Los Alamos in 1946 and returned to Cornell to complete his studies in nuclear physics, receiving his B.S. in 1947 and his Ph.D. in 1951. He and Margaret married in 1947 and were both employed in the physics department at Cornell through 1952. There he conducted pioneering experimental investigations of photo-nuclear reactions on a 300-Mev synchrotron he assisted in developing. He then went to the California Institute of Technology for three years as a senior research fellow, continuing his studies of photonuclear reactions on the 500-Mev Caltech synchrotron. In 1955, he joined Avco-Everett Laboratory as a principal scientist, where he carried out both experimental and theoretical studies of the chemical kinetics, radiation, and ionization of gases heated by high-intensity shock waves. He served as deputy director from 1960 to 1963. In 1965, accepted the position of Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, a position he held until his retirement in 1989. At MIT, he developed teaching and research programs in thermodynamics, kinetics and mechanics related to energy generation and air pollution. He was recognized by the National Academy of Engineering for "developing innovative, widely used concepts for modeling coupled chemical and physical phenomena in engine combustion and high-temperature flow." James C. Keck died on August 9, 2010.