Lodewijk van den Berg
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Lodewijk van den Berg
Education and career
Dr van den Berg was born on March 24, 1932, in Sluiskil, the Netherlands, and is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He was educated in the Netherlands, but after receiving a Masters degree in chemical engineering from the Technical University in Delft, he moved to the University of Delaware, where he took another masters degree, this time in applied science, and then his Ph.D., also in applied science.
Dr van den Berg has over twenty years of research and management experience in the preparation of crystalline materials — in particular, the growth of single crystals of chemical compounds, and the investigation of associated defect chemistry and electronic properties. After he had completed his Ph.D., he joined EG&G Corporation in Goleta, California, where he is responsible for the operation of a crystal-growing facility, which produces various kinds of crystal by vapor transport methods. Dr van den Berg is a co-investigator on the Spacelab-3 mission Vapor Crystal Growth System (VCGS) experiment. In that capacity, he is responsible for the crystal growth aspects of the VCGS experiment. He has intimate knowledge of VCGS and Fluid Experiment System (FES) hardware, and has participated in all major design and science reviews of those sytems. He has broad experience in crystal growth and characterization, including vapor transport, solution, and melt growth techniques. He is an international Authority on vapor growth techniques with an emphasis on mercuric iodide crystals and its application in the nuclear industry as gamma ray detectors.
Space flight experience
Dr van den Berg flew on STS-51B Challenger (April 29–May 6 1985). STS-51B, the Spacelab-3 mission, was launched from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, and returned to land at Edwards Air Force Base, California. It was the first operational Spacelab mission. The seven-man crew aboard Challenger conducted investigations into crystal growth, drop dynamics leading to containerless material processing, atmospheric trace gas spectroscopy, solar and planetary atmospheric simulation, cosmic rays, and laboratory-animal and human medical monitoring. By the end of the mission, Dr van den Berg had traveled over 2.9 million miles in 110 Earth orbits, and logged over 168 hours in space.
Source: Dr van den Berg (http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/vandenberg-l.html) — NASA