http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/world/europe/joseph-birman-dead.html 2016-10-14 04:27:06 Joseph L. Birman, Physicist and Humanitarian, Dies at 89 Dr. Birman was instrumental in the creation of a program that helped refugee scientists restart their careers in the United States in the 1990s. === Joseph L. Birman, a physics professor who was honored for his humanitarian work with scientists facing repression in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, helping scores of them to come to the United States, died on Oct. 1 in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was 89. The cause was complications of cancer, his son Carl David Birman said. Dr. Birman, a theoretical physicist whose specialty was condensed-matter theory, was widely known for his work with organizations like the With the French-American theoretical physicist Pierre Hohenberg, Dr. Birman set up the committee’s Program for Refugee Scientists, which helped more than 100 émigrés restart their scientific careers in the United States in the 1990s. In 2010 he was one of three recipients of the Dr. Birman was known as a tenacious fighter. “He would hector, debate, impress, push, cajole until every contrary sentiment and argument lay exhausted,’’ Dr. Irving A. Lerch, the American Physical Society’s director for international affairs, wrote in a personal tribute last week. Dr. Birman, he added, had helped make his “the generation that put to rest — forever — whether or not scientists have the right, the obligation, to speak out.” As early as the 1970s, Dr. Birman helped organize joint symposiums between the United States and the Soviet Union in New York, Moscow and St. Petersburg (then Leningrad). Dr. Jiufeng J. Tu, a City College colleague, said Dr. Birman and his co-organizers “would run the official meetings during the day and the unofficial refuseniks’ science seminar at someone’s apartment in the evening.” The In 2006 he received the Dr. Birman also worked with dissident Chinese scientists and, as he did with their Eastern European counterparts, helped them come to the United States and restart their careers. Dr. Tu recalled, “The word of mouth among Chinese scientists coming to the United States at that time was that their first contact had to be Professor Birman at C.C.N.Y.” Joseph Leon He began his career in the business world as a senior scientist at GTE Research Labs in New Jersey. But after a decade he switched to academia, going to work for New York University in 1962. He became a physics professor there and remained until 1974, when he joined the faculty of City College. At his death he was distinguished professor of physics there. A Harvard associate said that as recently as May he was talking eagerly about lectures he was preparing for the fall semester. In graduate school he met Joan Sylvia Lyttle, a fellow student in his chemistry lab. The story they told their children was that he waited until they ran into each other on a public bus before introducing himself. They learned, among other things, that their research interests were very similar and that they had been born nine days apart. They married in 1950. Dr. Birman, who lived in New Rochelle, is survived by his wife, Besides their son Carl, his survivors include another son, Kenneth; a daughter, Deborah Birman Shlider; and five grandchildren.