Dr. Charles R. Kurkjian graduated with a BSc. from Rutgers University in 1952, and earned his Sc D in Ceramics and Materials Science at MIT in 1955. While working at MIT, he met the lovely and talented Dorothy Alice Mazzarella, and they were married in June of 1955; they raised three children and traveled extensively before her death in 2009.
Dr. Kurkjian spent most of his life studying the behavior of glass. After a two-year post-doc at MIT and two more years in England, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. in 1959 where he spent 35 years working on glass behavior, specializing in the mechanical properties of silica optical fibers. For this work he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. After retiring from Bell Labs in 1994, he joined Bellcore, the so-called Bell Labs of the Baby Bells. After retiring from Bellcore in 1999 he spent two years as a research fellow at Rutgers until 2011. For several years he was affiliated with the University of Southern Maine in Gorham, and was an emeritus research professor at Rutgers in Material Science.
During his tenure at Bell Labs he held several academic positions internationally including Cairo Egypt, the UK, the former USSR, South Korea, and Japan. After retiring, he continued to collaborate with researchers worldwide, and was beloved as a mentor by many of his former students. His honors included the Morey Award, Glass Division, American Ceramic Society (1987), Rutgers University Distinguished Engineers Award (2014), and the L. David Pye Lifetime Achievement Award (2019), during which he gave a terrific acceptance speech to a packed auditorium despite having suffered a stroke in 2017. Dr. Kurkjian passed away at age 93, in January of 2023.