Elliot Levinthal, a Stanford professor of mechanical engineering and founder of the Levinthal Fellows program in creative writing, died on Jan. 14 in Palo Alto, at the age of 89.
Levinthal was born in 1922 in Brooklyn, New York. After earning a Ph.D. from Stanford in 1949, he went on to write a dissertation on the magnetic resonance of hydrogen atoms, which helped colleague Felix Bloch win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952.
Levinthal moved on to become a founding employee at Varian Associates, and would eventually become the director of the company. Under his guidance, Variance helped commercialize nuclear resonance, allowing it to be used as a tool in chemistry and biochemistry.
In 1953 Levinthal founded Levinthal Electronics Products, which went on to produce some of the earliest pacemakers and cardiac monitors.
Early in 1960 Levinthal joined Stanford Medical School and became involved in the search for extraterrestrial life, joined several NASA committees and helped interpret photos from the Mariner 9 Mars Orbiter mission.
Levinthal also served as the director for the Defense Sciences Office for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
After returning to Stanford from DARPA, Levinthal went on to become the director of the Stanford Institute for Manufacturing and Automation (SIMA), and later the associate dean of research at the School of Engineering.
In addition to his involvement at Stanford, Levinthal helped start the first venture capital fund in Silicon Valley. He was an avid traveller, reaching all seven continents in his lifetime; he also initiated projects to help low-income students reach their goal of attending Stanford.
In addition to a dedicated to science, Levinthal was known to have a soft spot in his heart for the humanities. Levinthal founded the Levinthal Fellows program in creative writing at Stanford to provide students a unique experience within the creative writing department.
Levinthal is survived by his wife Rhoda, four children and seven grandchildren.
— Brendan O’Byrne