Dr. Robert A. Schommer, a widely recognized expert on stellar populations and on cosmology, died tragically on December 12, 2001, in La Serena, Chile. He had been on the staff at Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory since 1990, where he was the equivalent of full professor, and where he had become the Project Scientist for the U.S. Gemini Project Office.

Bob leaves behind his wife Iris Labra, and three children, Paulina, Andrea, and Robert. Watching his love for his family over the past eleven years has been a great pleasure to all of us who knew and loved Bob ourselves.

Bob had many nicknames: "Bob," "Bobo," "Bobby," "Schommer," and "Dr. Doom." The most telling nickname, however, was given to him by the technical staff on Tololo mountain (most of us do not want to know their nicknames for us): "Tio Bob," which means "Uncle Bob."

Bob was born in Chicago December 9, 1946, to Harvey and Bea Schommer. His sister, Linda Jellison, now lives in Burlingame, Kansas. Bob's education included a B.A. in Physics (1970) at the University of Chicago, and an M.S. in Physics at the University of Washington (1972), followed by a transfer to the Washington Astronomy Department and a Ph.D. in 1977. His scientific studies were preceeded by two years in seminary college in Chicago.

During Bob's time as an astronomy graduate student, or very shortly thereafter, many scientific collaborations sprung up among the Washington students, whose offices were in a separate building from those of the faculty. Bob and Ron Canterna used the then-new Washington photometric system to explore the clusters of the outer halo of the Milky Way, coming to the conclusion that there was no metallicity gradient in the outer halo. They also found the first carbon star in a dwarf spheroidal galaxy from this broad-band photometry. Bob and I began our study of the stellar content of the Ursa Minor dwarf spheroidal galaxy. Schommer later gave finding charts of giants and carbon star candidates in several dwarf spheroidal galaxies, including Ursa Minor and Leo II, to the late (1950-1987) Marc Aaronson, thus allowing Aaronson to successfully observe for his and Jeremy Mould's classic survey of the properties of red giants in dwarf spheroidals. Schommer and Greg Bothun began a collaboration with their advisor, Woody Sullivan, to study the H I content of galaxies in several nearby clusters using Arecibo data. Schommer and Bothun realized that this work had more scientific power when used in concert with the infrared photometry of Aaronson and Mould and John Huchra. The new Arecibo data and new galaxy infrared photometry were then exploited in a series of papers, starting with Paper III of the Aaronson, Mould, Huchra series, which were seen to challenge the established size scale of the universe.

Bob went to Caltech in early 1977 as a postdoc on a Chaim Weitzmann fellowship. He began studies of the stellar content of Magellanic Cloud clusters using photographic plates from Las Campanas. Bob spent a year in Seattle as an instructor, where he taught Galactic Astronomy in the style of his mentor, Paul Hodge. Bob also spent time as a postdoc at Yerkes Observatory, and used a NATO postdoc to work at the Institute for Astronomy in Cambridge, England.

Bob was a professor in the Physics Department at Rutgers University for about a decade, after his itinerant postdoc/instructor period, and before his move to CTIO. During this time his science included some of the first CCD-imaging studies of LMC clusters, a paper on what is now called the "short distance" to the LMC, a study of the kinemtaics of the system of LMC clusters, the abundances and age-metallicity relation of those same clusters, and a provocative comment about the mass and extent of the LMC. He collaborated with Carol Christian on the cluster system of M33 and ultimately showed how different the cluster systems of the Milky Way, the LMC, and M33 were. He also teamed up with Rutgers Professor Ted Williams to bring the Rutgers Imaging Fabry-Perot to CTIO where it was available to the community for several years. Besides doing science, Bob tried to reject the concept of tenure, refusing to sign his initial tenure papers at Rutgers.

George Lake and Bob Schommer began their studies of the dark matter contents of galaxies in the early 1980s while Lake was at Bell Labs and sharing living quarters with Bob. They derived M/L of galaxies from studies of binary galaxies, and later teamed up with Jacqueline van Gorkom to measure the rotation curve of DDO 170 out to a distance of 7.4 disk scale lengths.

During the 1980s and 1990s Bob's interests in halos of galaxies, masses of galaxies, kinematics of galaxies, and the local and global distance scales continued. After moving to Cerro Tololo he began to be more involved in supernovae and cosmology, starting an incredibly productive decade of research with Nick Suntzeff and Mark Phillips and many others. While the supernova research seems to have taken most of his scientific time (he once calculated that he had only 10% of his time to do science, as opposed to the advertised 50%), he was still involved in studies of the cluster and old stellar populations in nearby galaxies, often using HST. His work in the 1990s will be largely remembered for the Tololo-Calan collaboration and the High-Z Supernova Search, which ultimately led to the paper (Riess et al, 1998, AJ, 116, 1009) arguing that we live in an accelerating universe with a cosmological constant.

Reading the list of 195 titles with Schommer's name on them in ADS was a revelation, even though I had known him for all but one of those papers. There is so much good science not mentioned in this obituary, in collaboration with so many people unmentioned here who also loved to collaborate with, and loved the man, Bob Schommer.

Bob's attitude about collaboration was antithetical to that fed to the public by public relations departments and popular science magazines. His collaborations were remarkable for their inclusiveness. There was no team leader, everyone was an equal. These collaborations were strengthened, because of this attitude, to be more than the seeming sum of their parts. Plus, they were fun! And isn't that why we do science, to have fun?

Bob never had an internal caste system. Everyone he contacted felt that they were his friend, which of course made daily interactions more enjoyable, and allowed more work to get done. Bob's attitude from the earliest days was that we are all in this together, observatory directors and scientific colleagues and engineers and technicians and support staff. He treated everyone as he expected to be treated. Bob also believed that observers all have to help each other, for telescopes and weather have a way of not quite cooperating, potentially leaving us stranded without that last piece of data. He gave freely of his observing time and of his observing skills. Bob's inclusiveness, his caring for other observers, his skills as a diplomat and a gadfly and instrument builder, and his excellent training and experience in both Physics and Astronomy made him a natural choice as head of the US Gemini Project Office as Gemini came on line. For Bob, the mission was how to get the observers their observations with a minimum of bureaucratic and technological impediments. For many of us, it came as a surprise that he was willing to give up much of his scientific time to undertake what seemed to be this hopeless chore. The countless meetings and telecons did take something significant away from Bob, but from all accounts he was a calming and sensible influence on the US Gemini project.

Bob cared passionately about politics going back at least to his days as an undergrad at Chicago during the Johnson and Nixon Vietnam days. He was a liberal in the true sense of the word, not as it has been coopted today. He financially supported many causes such as Amnesty International and schools in high-poverty areas. He was a board member of a small foundation, called the Fantasy Salvage Fund, set up in the bequest of his late college friend Harold Seewald, which tried to help causes dear to the hearts of those [mostly] 1960s University of Chicago students: a grant to a Mexican political asylum-seeker to support her while her asylum application was processed; a purchase of computers for Seewald's local public library; a Free Tibet/Tibetan spirituality conference; the Zip-Zap Circus School in South Africa (which trains orphans from all over the world in circus skills for future careers as circus performers); the Harold Seewald Hampshire County Fuel Fund (providing fuel subsidies for low-income people); a matching grant to the Meekins, MA, library.

Bob believed in helping others. He moved to Tucson twice in the late 1980s to be with me after the tragic death of our collaborator Marc Aaronson. Bob left Rutgers for a while to care for his sister and her children during her serious illness. Bob brought his nephew Bill to Chile for a year to help resolve some family problems. Bob was also Uncle Bob to children of many friends.

One way of understanding Bob's mix of great science and great humanity is from a few quotations from emails that people have sent me over the past few months:

From John Filhaber, formerly of CTIO and Gemini: "I spent quite a bit of time with Bob working on the small telescopes and listening to jazz and arguing about the Red Sox. He was proof that you can do great work and be a great person at the same time. I remember one time he had me laughing so hard I couldn't stand up. I can't remember why, but it doesn't matter."

From Bob's Massachusetts friend Mark Karpel: "Bobby was wonderful. He was smart, funny, incredibly kind and, crossing religions, a 'mensch.' He lived for about a year in a little apartment attached to our house when he was working elsewhere [Rutgers] and wanted a place to crash in the [Amherst] Valley when he came up for visits. He was a treat to have around. He somehow got my kids interested in volcanoes and, for years after he left, would send them postcards of volcanoes from his various travel destinations."

From Bob's college friend and Seattle friend Ed Forman: "...So many people love Bob. What a wonderment. How can he inspire such feelings of love, of protectiveness?

"Orientation week, August 1966, Henderson House, Pierce Tower dorm. Bob, newly freed from seminary, glorying, reveling in freedom. Busting loose; grabbing the world... Seattle, Bob in crazy, creative, joyful spate of words, ideas, and music... Endless (we thought) experimentation, adventuring, roistering...I've only known maybe half a dozen people in my life that I thought were truly brilliant. There are gradations, of course, but most of us are roughly in the same level... But Bob was one of those in that rare stratum of the brilliant. Most of the time he was at pains to not show it, but when he did it was blinding. I think it gave him insights and understanding that I can only imagine. But I also think that it isolated him to some degree, that it made him sad on some level. I always felt that there was some part of Bob that was remote for this reason, unattainable, and I thought maybe it had to do with that awesome intelligence and insight... It gave him tremendous compassion, but I think it also gave him tremendous pain, for other people and himself."

From John Marino, who knew Bob from about 1964 onward: "He was always in 'trouble'; a self-described 'freak' trying to fit into a world for which he had too many brains and too big a heart. I remember his playful insanity over fears of earth being destroyed by an asteroid, our moaning and 'studying' for exams by reading 'Catch 22' out loud, his mom's cancer and death, debates over the history and philosophy of science, the time we saw Janis Joplin in concert, his paronia that he had been x-rayed to death working one summer in a mobile chest x-ray unit, our daily ritual of getting ice cream at Baskins and Robbins--even in the dead of Chicago winters, our plotting to remove Lyndon Johnson at the Democratic Convention in '68, our trip to Wisconsin to work for Gene McCarty when Bob became Paul Newman's personal chauffeur!--and a million other things at the time typical of college students, when one is trying to become an adult, turn dreams and ambitions into reality. Most of all I remember Bob as a friend."

There were many other pleasures in having known Bob Schommer. Bob was fanatic about sports and music. Cassettes and emails flowed to many of us. Bob rarely slept completely through the night, so he could be counted on to send email at all hours to help his friends survive observing. I showed other collaborators the trick of sending Bob email saying "I'm at the xxx telescope. Give me a call," and the phone would ring within a couple of hours almost without exception, no matter what the hour. Observing nights are much longer without Bob.

[Nota Bene: Nick Suntzeff wrote a beautiful tribute for the Gemini Telescope Newsletter #24, page 26, 2002.]

Edward W. Olszewski
Steward Observatory
University of Arizona
July 24, 2002