Emeritus Professor John Venables has passed away peacefully aged 87 on 18 July 2023 at Claydon House nursing home in Lewes.
Following his degrees at Cambridge and a post-doc in the US, John came to Sussex in 1964 amongst the first few cohorts of lecturers. He was duly promoted to Reader and then Professor, and was Dean of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences (1992-94).
John had many research collaborations in Europe, particularly at the Université Aix-Marseille, and so, following Britain’s entry to the then Common Market in 1973, he, together with mathematician Prof James Hirschfeld and others developed the Science with European Studies programme. This enabled Sussex students to spend a year studying science abroad after having taken language and European history courses beforehand. He was justly proud of this highly successful project which pre-dated the Erasmus programme by a decade, and of the way research collaborations and student exchanges often intertwined.
The primary objective of much of John’s research was to unravel the fundamental physics governing how a very thin layer of one material grows on another, on an atom-by-atom and then layer-by-layer basis. His innovative experimental work used electron microscopy to look a wide range of systems from rare gas solids grown on graphite to metals deposited onto metals and semiconductors. These studies were always done on atomically clean surfaces under ultra-high vacuum conditions in the highly specialised transmission and scanning microscopes he developed for the purpose.
At Sussex, together with Chris Harland, an Experimental Officer in John’s group for nearly 20 years, he made significant advances in the Electron Back Scattering Diffraction (EBSD) technique and in the use of biased sample imaging to visualise single monolayer deposits of metals. In parallel with the experiments, much of his work, particularly in later years was concerned with the theoretical modelling of these nucleation and growth processes.
From 1984 onwards, John had spent three months each year at Arizona State University, working with John Cowley and others to develop a novel analytical electron microscope, the Midas project. He eventually moved to a full-time professorship at ASU in 1994, whilst retaining his Sussex connections as Honorary Professor.
Alongside his academic life, John was also a keen musician. He and his wife, Delia, played music together, throughout their 60 years in Lewes. He was also a keen violinist in the Tunbridge Wells Symphony Orchestra, for a generation.
A caring and generous man with a lust for life, John is survived by his wife, his brother, two children, five grandchildren and many friends.
His funeral will be held on Thursday 3 August 2023. For details about the service, please contact his son Julian on 01273 4724424.