Remembering Kenneth Ford (1926-2025)

Kenneth Ford, executive director of AIP from 1987 to 1993, passed away Dec. 5, at the age of 99. Ford was a fixture in and faithfully served the physical sciences community for decades as a researcher, professor, author, and leader. He supported programs and worked for multiple physics organizations throughout his career.

AIP mourns the loss of Ford, who led the transition that was the moving of AIP’s headquarters from New York City to the American Center for Physics in College Park, Maryland, in 1993.

“We were sorry to hear of Ken’s passing, and all of AIP joins in sending our condolences to the Ford family,” said Michael Moloney, CEO of AIP. “His career in research, education and global scientific collaboration puts him among the giants.

“This organization which I now have the privilege to lead, is fortunate to have had his steady and transformative leadership, the legacy of which persists. AIP will continue to reap the benefits of his forward thinking for decades to come.”

Ford was born May 1, 1926, in West Palm Beach, Florida. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in physics from Harvard University, then a doctorate in theoretical physics from Princeton University in 1953. From 1950 to 1952, Ford took a leave of absence from his studies to work on the design of the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Princeton University’s Project Matterhorn.

He then went on to teach physics at various universities, beginning with Indiana University and continuing to Brandeis University; the University of California, Irvine; and the University of Massachusetts Boston. Ford was UC Irvine’s first chair of the physics department and also served as the president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and executive vice president of the University of Maryland Systems.

After leaving academia, he joined Molecular Biophysics Technology as its president, and in 1986 was hired as the first education officer at the American Physical Society, an AIP Member Society.

In 1987, he was appointed as executive director of AIP, succeeding the late H. William Koch. During Ford’s tenure, AIP expanded its journal portfolio and increased the impact of AIP’s education-focused activity.

“My personal priorities include educating children and the public and preserving the history of physics,” Ford said in a 1993 interview with Physics Today.

One of Ford’s biggest legacies within AIP was stewarding the move of the organization’s headquarters from New York City to College Park, Maryland — with the foresight of being closer to where policy is made.

At the time, AIP considered multiple locations, but the proximity to Washington, D.C. (where many Member Societies were already based at the time) and the opportunity for expansion were the biggest reasons for choosing College Park, which Ford explained in an oral history interview with AIP in 1997.

This move also expanded the physical space of the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, tripling its archival space.

The collapse of the Soviet Union during Ford’s time as executive director posed a challenge to AIP’s many translations and publications of Russian-language physics journals. Under Ford’s leadership, AIP was able to retain most of their publication rights, despite a tumultuous political landscape and commercial stresses.

Ford left AIP in 1993, right after the move to Maryland was completed. After his retirement, he went on to publish many books, including one about his time at the Matterhorn Project, called “Building the H Bomb.” Despite instructions from the Department of Energy to remove potentially classified sections of the book, Ford published it mostly unchanged.

“Defying one’s government is unsettling, but DOE made it easy by the sheer magnitude of what it wanted removed — 60 passages, ranging from a few words to a few paragraphs, comprising in total some 10% of the book,” Ford told Physics Today in 2015. “To have acceded to DOE’s request (actually its instruction) would have destroyed the book.”

Beyond writing, Ford also taught high school physics and continued to pursue his hobby of flying light planes and gliders during his retirement. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and APS.

Ford was preceded in death by his wife, Joanne Ford. He is survived by his sister, seven children, 13 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.