George Bekefi

George Bekefi (14 March 1925 in Prague – 17 August 1995 in Brookline, Massachusetts) was a plasma physicist, a professor at MIT, and an inventor.
In 1939 Bekefi emigrated from Czechoslovakia to England by means of a British government program to help Jewish children. He received in 1948 a B.S. in science and mathematics from University College London. In 1948 he went to Montreal as an instructor in the physics department of McGill University, where he earned an M.S. in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1952. At McGill he became a research associate and then an assistant professor, leaving in 1957 to join MIT's Plasma Physics Group in the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Bekefi remained at MIT for the remainder of his career. In MIT's physics department he became in 1961 an assistant professor, in 1964 an associate professor, and in 1967 a full professor, retiring in the summer of 1995 as professor emeritus.
Bekefi guided about 50 graduate students to their M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. Upon his death from leukemia, he was survived by a wife, a son, and a daughter.