In Memoriam

Mellinkoff, who transformed the fledgling UCLA School of Medicine into a nationally recognized academic institution, died on July 17 at age 96.

Author, critic and UCLA emerita English professor Carolyn See, 82, died July 13 in Santa Monica as a result of congestive heart failure.

Ren Mao, director of application development, died July 4 in Los Angeles of cancer. He was 37 years old. 

Richard Wain Young, 86, professor emeritus of anatomy, died May 18 surrounded by family members at his home in Hollywood. For more than 55 years, he worked at the medical school at UCLA and published his last book, “Human Origins and Evolution,” in 2014.

Jimmie D. White, 68, who served as a counselor, administrator and attorney advisor in UCLA Student Affairs for 35 years, died in Los Angeles on May 27 of cancer.  

A staff scientist in the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Biochemistry, Amirsakis passed away on May 24.

Klug, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, died June 1 in a shooting in his office.

A memorial will be held on Wednesday, June 8 at the UCLA California NanoSystems Institute.

A highly respected scholar with expertise in space plasma physics, Ashour-Abdalla also had a passion for teaching.

A physical chemist who joined the faculty in 1948, Scott died on May 1. He was 94.

Don Nakanishi, a UCLA scholar who gained national recognition for establishing Asian American studies as a viable and relevant field of scholarship, teaching, community service and public discourse, died March 21. He was 66.

Jura played a major role in advancing scholarship in his field and in shaping UCLA’s Division of Astronomy and Astrophysics over the course of four decades.

The professor emeritus of the UCLA Department of History died on Jan. 16.

Terasaki, who earned three degrees from UCLA, developed the test that became the international standard method for tissue typing and was a generous benefactor to his alma mater.

Reiss was an accomplished physical chemist and theorist in the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Leavitt passed away on Nov. 27 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 76.

Jack Share, who in the 1970s served as an assistant professor in UCLA’s Special Education Division and the Graduate School of Education, died on Nov. 4 at Kaiser Hospital in Woodland Hills.

Soja studied and extensively wrote about regional development, planning and governance, and the spatiality of social life in Los Angeles and other cities.

Helen 'Lena' S. Astin, Distinguished Professor Emerita at UCLA and senior scholar at the Higher Education Research Institute, died on Oct. 27 in Los Angeles at the age of 83 after a prolonged illness.

Richard F. Heck, a UCLA alumnus who captured the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry, died Friday in Manila after suffering for years from a number of illnesses, including prostate cancer and diabetes. He was 84.

H. Viscount “Berky” Nelson — a mentor, mediator and role model for generations of students during his four-decade career at UCLA — died Oct. 5 in Los Angeles at the age of 76 after a lengthy illness.

Ornitz was a pioneer in establishing the brain-based nature of autism.

Rich Bertolucci, associate sports information director for UCLA Athletics, died on July 28, following a long battle with cancer. He was 56.

Professor of art history Irene Bierman-McKinney, lauded by a colleague as 'one of the unsung intellectual forces of our field of Islamic art and architecture,' died on March 8, 2015.

Carol Kruse, a UCLA scientist and recognized leader in immunological therapy for brain cancer, passed away on March 28 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 61.