Family and friends will gather on Friday to pay their respects to Chemistry professor Alan MacDiarmid.
The service for MacDiarmid, a Nobel Prize laureate who taught and researched chemistry at Penn for 52 years, follows his death three weeks ago at age 79.
Though planners recognize that scheduling the public memorial service for the day before Spring Break will make it difficult for students to attend, they say that date was chosen to accommodate family and prominent colleagues.
These guests range from Alan Heege, one of MacDiarmid's co-Nobel Prize winners, to Roy Ferguson, the ambassador of New Zealand, where MacDiarmid was born in 1927.
"We wanted to make sure that the right people were there to pay tribute" to MacDiarmid, said Marsha Lester, chairwoman of the Chemistry department, who was in charge of planning the service.
In the meantime, those who knew MacDiarmid are taking time to reflect on the chemist's life.
"He was a true scholar," said Chemistry Department Executive Director Dave Pursell. "But beyond that, he was a really funny, energetic, enjoyable person."
"He was just very excited about whatever he was working on," Lester said.
Still, his intelligence and prestigious awards never went to his head.
"I remember one particular quote he always said was, 'I am a lucky person, and the harder I work, the luckier I seem to be,'" Vicky Truei, MacDiarmid's secretary for four years, wrote in an e-mail.
Ira Winston, the information-technology executive director for the School of Arts and Sciences, had MacDiarmid for an introductory Chemistry course as a freshman in the spring of 1977 and likewise recalled his humble nature.
"It was interesting because it wasn't until many years later that I discovered that he was sort of this major-league researcher," Winston said. "He was sort of an unassuming guy - you never would have thought of that."
Winston added that he would always remember MacDiarmid's distinct New Zealand accent.
And in the spirit of MacDiarmid's native New Zealand tradition, a video of MacDiarmid performing a traditional Maori tribal dance that he learned as a child will be shown at the memorial service, Pursell said.
MacDiarmid's cultural heritage was important to him up until the end of his life, especially as his condition worsened, said Gayl Gentile, his partner of 14 years and wife since 2005.
"He never acknowledged that he was as sick as he was," Gentile said. As he became more sick, he was adamant that the pair take a trip to New Zealand, she added.
MacDiarmid passed away trying to make that final trip: He fell down the stairs in his home on the way to the airport, was rushed to Delaware County Memorial Hospital and died shortly after.
And while MacDiarmid didn't make it back to New Zealand that one last time, Gentile and Penn officials plan to honor the Nobel Prize winner with a memorial scholarship linking West Philadelphia to the land that he called home.
"He had always wanted students from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, to have a scholarship program where they could come and work at Penn," Gentile said. To that end, "we set up a memorial scholarship for them at Penn."
The public University memorial service for Alan MacDiarmid will take place on Friday at 3 p.m. in Irvine Auditorium.
