Obituaries

Age 80, March 1, 2017. Predeceased by husbands Paul G. Lavezzo in 1974 and Sumner T. Budd in 1999. Daughter of Edward Levanson of Millis, MA and Natalie Weiner of Somerville, MA. Mother of Juli Lavezzo (Fleming) Vachon, James Lavezzo, Edward Lavezzo, Andrew Lavezzo and Adam Budd. Died at home surrounded by family and friends after a long courageous battle. Marlene grew up in Chelsea, MA until she was 15, when her parents moved the family to Sharon. While she raised five children, she also found time to help others, volunteering for seniors who needed rides to Boston doctors, delivering Meals-on-Wheels, as a school aide and Cub Scout den mother, and donating time to fund collections for cancer research, heart disease and other charities. She was a past president of the American Legion Auxiliary. Marlene held many jobs throughout her life but most of all was a homemaker. She loved to sing in the Temple Sinai Choir and the Sharon Community Chorus. She painted in her spare time and loved to indulge herself in many books and novels, but her passion later in life was ballroom dancing where she danced until she could no longer. The family will sit shiva on Sunday 3-7 pm and Monday and Tues 4- 8 pm at her late residence, 12 Pole Plain Rd., Sharon, MA. Donations may be made to the Sharon Public Library.

Of Weston, passed away peacefully on February 26, 2017 surrounded by family, after 102 1/2 years of a wonderful life.

She was born in Wawarsing, NY on August 16, 1914, the daughter of Harry Cross and Anna Horowitz Cross who immigrated from Russia. Natalie was married  to her beloved husband Herman for  58 years until he passed away in 1999. She earned her RN degree from Stamford Hospital School of Nursing in 1936  and worked in a variety of nursing jobs throughout her career, from pediatrics to convalescent care clinics at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NY.

She and Herman raised their family in Yonkers, NY and moved to Sandwich when she retired in 1980.  Natalie loved antique collecting and Sandwich glass, and served as a volunteer at the Sandwich Glass Museum for more than 25 years.  She moved to Newton in 2010 and finally to Weston in 2016.

Natalie is survived by her daughter, Joy Davis and son-in-law Dr. Gerald Davis of Bedford, NY; son Dr. Robert Markman of Northridge, CA; daughter Lesley Markman of Newton; plus 8 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren. She will be dearly missed by all.                  Funeral services will be held in Pleasantville, NY on Wednesday, March 1.

Donations in Natalie’s honor may be made to Good Shepherd Community Care, 90 Wells Ave., Newton, MA 02459, the Sandwich Glass Museum, Sandwich, or the Heritage Plantation in Sandwich.

Goldman, Thomas I., “Tom”, of Needham, unexpectedly on February 24, 2017. Beloved husband of Naomi (Rau) Goldman. Cherished father of Amanda and Julia. Loving son of George and Paula (Nissen) Goldman. Devoted brother of Daniel Goldman, Matthew Goldman (Lauren), Jon Goldman (Anne Marie), and Gail Goldman. Dear son-in-law of Margot Lee (Albert Gromulat) and John Rau (Marilyn). Uncle of Jacob, Alexander, Aaron, and Joseph. Services at Temple Beth Shalom, 670 Highland Ave., Needham, MA, Thursday, March 2, 2017 at 1:00 pm. Following interment in Westview Cemetery, Lexington, memorial observance will be held at the Goldman home, 93 Gayland Rd., Needham, Thursday until 7 pm, Friday 1-5 pm, and Saturday 6-9 pm. In lieu of flowers, donations in Tom’s memory may be made to the American Nicaraguan Foundation – anfnicaragua.org, the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps – rfkchildren.org, or the American Heart Association – heart.org

of Stoughton, formerly of Randolph, on February 24, 2017. Beloved wife of Simeon “Simmy” Korisky. Step-mother of Elizabeth D. Heiss (Mark) of CT, Cynthia Korisky (Michael Butler) of Medford, and the late Michael Korisky and his surviving wife Cindy Charlton of CO. Cherished grandmother of Matthew Heiss of CT, Wesley and Colin Korisky of CO. Dear sister of Vivian Atkin (Neal) of CA. Glenda was a dedicated employee of the Anti-Defamation League for 18 years, Jewish Vocation Services for 14 years, and the dedicated nanny to Jilaine, Jessica, Joseph, and Juliane Marder for 10 years. Services at Temple Beth Am, 871 North Main St., Randolph, MA 02368, Monday, February 27, 2017 at 12:00 noon. Following interment at the Boylston Lodge Memorial Park, 776 Baker St., West Roxbury, memorial observance will be at the Korisky home on Monday until 8 pm, Tuesday and Wednesday 4-8 pm. In lieu of flowers, donations in Glenda’s memory may be made to Temple Beth Am at the above address.

of Newton Highlands, on February 22, 2017. Beloved wife of the late Bertram Porter. Loving aunt of Daniel Green of Newton Highlands. Private services were held at the Beth El Cemetery in West Roxbury. Donations in Elaine’s memory may be made to Cong. Agudas Achim Anshe Sfard, P.O. Box 600371, Newton, MA 02460.

KOPP- Harriet (Marcks), of Canton, formerly of Brookline, on February 20, 2017. Beloved wife of the late Jack Kopp, Murray Cohen, and Dr. Israel Kopp. Devoted mother of Marvin Kopp and stepmother of Joshua Kopp and his wife Mabel. Dear grandmother of Julie Smily (Terry), Alison Crawford (Toby), and the late Shoshana Brady and her surviving husband Jason. Great grandmother of Matthew, Daniel, Samuel, Hailey, and Joshua. Loving sister of Fay Gorfinkle. She also leaves a special friend Carol Dolan. Graveside services at the Independent Pride of Boston Cemetery, 776 Baker St. West Roxbury, on Thursday, February 23, 2017 at 10 am. Following services memorial observance will be at Orchard Cove, 1 Del Pond Drive, Canton 12-3 pm. Memorial observance will continue at the home of Marvin Kopp on Thursday 7-9 pm, and Friday 1-4 pm. Remembrances may be made to Orchard Cove, C/O Hebrew Senior Life, 1200 Centre St. Roslindale, MA 02131.

Mildred Dresselhaus, a professor emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research into the fundamental properties of carbon helped transform it into the superstar of modern materials science and the nanotechnology industry, died on Monday in Cambridge, Mass. She was 86.

Her death, at Mount Auburn Hospital, was confirmed by her granddaughter Leora Cooper. No cause was given.

Nicknamed the Queen of Carbon in scientific circles, Dr. Dresselhaus was renowned for her efforts to promote the cause of women in science. She was the first woman to secure a full professorship at M.I.T., in 1968, and she worked vigorously to ensure that she would not be the last.

In 1971, she and a colleague organized the first Women’s Forum at M.I.T. to explore the roles of women in science. Two years later she won a Carnegie Foundation grant to further that cause. “I met Millie on my interview for a faculty job in 1984,” said Lorna Gibson, now a professor of materials science and engineering. “M.I.T. was quite intimidating then for a new female, but Millie made it all seem possible, even effortless. I knew it wouldn’t be, but she was such an approachable intellectual powerhouse, she made it seem that way.”Today, women make up about 22 percent of M.I.T.’s faculty.“Millie was very straightforward, no frilly stuff, and I loved that about her,” said Jacqueline K. Barton, a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. “She was always warm and supportive to me, but I also had the feeling it was important to let her know about my last good experiment.”Dr. Dresselhaus’s own story was one of struggle and perseverance. The daughter of impoverished Jewish immigrants from Poland, she grew up humbly in the Bronx, sometimes on public assistance, but excelled in school — winning scholarships, finding a mentor in a future Nobel laureate and earning advanced degrees at leading universities.This month, Dr. Dresselhaus found a measure of popular culture fame at the center of a General Electric TV commercial that boasts of a corporate commitment to hiring more women.

In the ad, little girls play with Millie Dresselhaus dolls and dress up in Millie Dresselhaus wigs and sweaters. Parents name their newborn girls Millie, and journalists breathlessly seek the next Dresselhaus sighting. Dr. Dresselhaus appears in the commercial as well.

“What if we treated great female scientists like they were stars?” the narrator says. “What if Millie Dresselhaus were as famous as any celebrity?”

What If Scientists Were Celebrities? – GE Video by General Electric

For its part, carbon is as capricious as any celebrity. It is the graphite of a pencil, worn down by a simple doodle. Arrayed in a three-dimensional crystal, it is a diamond, the hardest substance known.

Dr. Dresselhaus used resonant magnetic fields and lasers to map out the electronic energy structure of carbon. She investigated the traits that emerge when carbon is interwoven with other materials: Stitch in some alkali metals, for example, and carbon can become a superconductor, in which an electric current meets virtually no resistance.

Dr. Dresselhaus was a pioneer in research on fullerenes, also called buckyballs: soccer-ball-shaped cages of carbon atoms that can be used as drug delivery devices, lubricants, filters and catalysts.

She conceived the idea of rolling a single-layer sheet of carbon atoms into a hollow tube, a notion eventually realized as the nanotube — a versatile structure with the strength of steel but just one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair.

She worked on carbon ribbons, semiconductors, nonplanar monolayers of molybdenum sulfide, and the scattering and vibrational effects of tiny particles introduced into ultrathin wires.

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She published more than 1,700 scientific papers, co-wrote eight books and gathered a stack of accolades as fat as a nanotube is fine.

Dr. Dresselhaus was awarded the National Medal of Science, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (bestowed by President Barack Obama), the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the Enrico Fermi prize and dozens of honorary doctorates. She also served as president of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and worked in the Department of Energy in the Clinton administration.

“Every morning she’d leave the house at 5:30, the first car in the parking lot every day, and everyone she collaborated with she viewed as family,” said Ms. Cooper, Dr. Dresselhaus’s granddaughter, who is a graduate student at M.I.T. “Her life and her science were intertwined.”

Dr. Dresselhaus in 2014, when she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Credit Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

She was born Mildred Spiewak on Nov. 11, 1930, in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of the former Ethel Teichtheil and Meyer Spiewak.“My early years were spent in a dangerous, multiracial, low-income neighborhood,” she wrote in a biographical sketch. “My early elementary school memories up through ninth grade are of teachers struggling to maintain class discipline with occasional coverage of academics.”

For all the family’s financial hardships, Mildred and her older brother, Irving, became gifted violinists who won scholarships to music schools.

From age 6 on, Mildred took the subway long distances on her own, burdened, as she recalled, with books and musical instruments as she stumbled down steps. When somebody told her about Hunter High School, the highly selective public school in Manhattan, she wrote away for old entry exams, studied them and then aced the test.

There, her predilections were clear: “In math and science,” the yearbook declared, Mildred Spiewak is “second to none.”

After graduating she enrolled at Hunter College, where she intended to become a schoolteacher until she took an elementary physics class with Rosalyn Yalow, a future Nobel laureate, who urged her to consider a career in science.

“She was a very domineering person,” Dr. Dresselhaus said in an interview in 2012. “She had definite ideas about everything.”

Dr. Yalow, she wrote in the biographical sketch, “became a lifelong mentor.”

Dr. Dresselhaus earned a master’s degree from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where she studied under the celebrated physicist Enrico Fermi. She lived in his neighborhood, and every morning they would walk to the university together talking science. The conversations were thrilling, she said, and they kept her going through a grueling program from which 75 percent of the students dropped out.

At Chicago she met Gene Dresselhaus, a fellow physicist, and married him. He survives her, as do her four children, Marianne, Carl, Paul and Eliot; and, besides Ms. Cooper, four other grandchildren, M.I.T. said.

Dr. Dresselhaus and her husband both ended up at M.I.T. in 1960, one of the few places willing to hire husband-and-wife scientists. There she worked at Lincoln Laboratory, a defense research center, where she was one of two women on a scientific staff of 1,000. “We were pretty much invisible,” she later recalled.

One reason Dr. Dresselhaus said she chose to study carbon was its relative unpopularity. “I was happy to work on a project that most people thought was hard and not that interesting,” she said. “If one day I had to be at home with a sick child, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

Funeral service was held on Wednesday, February 22, 2017 in the MIT Chapel. Burial followed in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge.

of West Newton, on February 20, 2017. Daughter of the late Morris and Mollie (Wax) Liss. Beloved wife of Edward Brown. Devoted mother of Julie Gagnon and her husband Chad. Cherished grandmother of Audrey Hannah. Loving sister of the late Robert “Robbie” Liss. Also survived by several dear nieces and nephews. Services at Temple Beth Israel, 25 Harvard St., Waltham, MA, Thursday, February 23, 2017 at 1:00 pm. Following interment at Beth Israel Cemetery, 190 South St., Waltham, Renee’s family will be sitting shiva at the temple on Thursday from 3-7:30 pm. Shiva will continue at the Brown/Gagnon residence on Friday, February 24, 1-4 pm, Saturday, February 25, 6:30-8:30 pm with minyan service at 7 pm, Sunday, February 26, 11 am – 1 pm and 5-8 pm with minyan at 7 pm, and Monday and Tuesday, February 27 and 28, 1-4 pm and 6-8 pm with minyan at 7 pm, and Wednesday, March 1st, 1-4 pm. There is a nut allergy at the family home, so please refrain from bringing products containing nuts. In lieu of flowers, donations in her memory may be made to Temple Beth Israel, PO Box 540182, Waltham, MA 02454-0182.

Elsa Freida Weisman Stratton of Lexington, MA, on February 17, 2017. Beloved wife of the late Lawrence (Jack) Stratton. Devoted mother of Lori Jean Stratton and Diane Frances Stratton. Dear grandmother of Emma Laws and Lila Stratton and loving sister of Sylvia Weisman Waldman. Service at Westview Cemetery, 520 Bedford St., Lexington, Monday, February 20, 2017 at 10:30 am. Following service, family and friends are invited back to Elsa’s late residence until 4:00 pm. In lieu of flowers, remembrances may be made in Elsa’s name to the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, 118 Cliff Rd., Nantucket, MA 02554.