Remembering Bill Chambers

Bill Chambers, a Fellow of the MAS, early pioneer of EPMA, and a significant contributor to MAS, has passed away. A memorial service will be held at Annandale UMC (Annandale, VA) on August 10, 2024.

His obituary may be viewed at this link.

Among other contributions to the society, Bill served as MAS President in 1988, received the MAS Service Award in 1989, and served as Editor for Microbeam Analysis. He was inducted as an MAS Fellow in the inaugural class of Fellows in 2018. MAS Member Paul Carpenter had the following personal remembrance:

Bill Chambers was a great person, an excellent EPMA analyst, and a central figure in MAS. He made fundamental contributions to the automation of Cameca and JEOL electron microprobes using Sandia TASK software, cowritten with Joe Doyle. They raised the PDP-11 automation to the greatest height possible via re-entrant subroutined real-time control of Tracor Northern TN-5500 and TN-5600 hardware and fit the code into the 64k address space of the computer. Their contributions enabled automated PHA control and use of Bence-Albee and phi-rho-z correction algorithms executed during the measurement loop of the hardware. I personally went through sections of Flextran code with Bill and was very impressed with his wide ranging knowledge. Bill, Doyle, and Paul Hlava all achieved great expertise in EPMA together. He was always friendly and serves as an example of professionalism.

Paul Carpenter