Research scientist Fred Spiess, who briefly headed the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, has died of cancer, the school said. He was 86.
Spiess died on September 8 at UC San Diego’s Thornton Hospital in La Jolla, California.
”We are deeply saddened to hear of Fred Spiess’s passing,” Marye Anne Fox, chancellor of UC San Diego, said in a statement. ”Fred was a brilliant innovator in ocean science who dedicated decades of enthusiastic leadership to the development of UC San Diego and to the University of California.”
Spiess was acting director of Scripps from 1962/63 and director from 1964/65.
From 1980/88, he served as director of UC’s Institute of Marine Resources.
He designed and built instruments, took them to sea for deployment and led numerous expeditions to investigate the deepest parts of the world’s oceans.
A co-inventor of Flip, a 106,5m floating instrument platform, Spiess helped further ocean research by creating a stable base for scientific exploration on the rough seas.
Born in Oakland, Spiess earned his undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree from Harvard University. He returned to Berkeley for a doctorate in physics.
Spiess served in the navy during World War II and was stationed on a submarine in the Pacific. – Sapa-AP