Gabriel Laufer
About
Throughout his career Gabriel Laufer worked at various capacities for Technion in Israel, NASA and the University of Virginia until his retirement in 2017. His work involved the application of lasers to medicine and development of techniques for environmental remote sensing. His projects included a suite of passive remote sensors that were launched by NASA on two dedicated suborbital rockets missions to monitor the distribution of methane in the stratosphere and chlorophyll in the Chesapeake Bay; high sensitivity laser induced fluorescence techniques for measurements in supersonic wind tunnels. He was the inventor of ChemSight, a commercial remote sensor for the detection of weapon chemicals and toxic industrial chemicals for security applications.
After retiring, in 2018, Laufer wrote the book “A Survivor’s Duty”, a family and personal biography describing his father’s holocaust survival in the Hungarian forced labor battalions and in a German concentration camp. In 2023 he translated from Hebrew together with Andrew Cassel the diary “Notes from the Valley of Slaughter” which was written by Dr. Aharon Pick during the Holocaust in the Šiauliai ghetto in Lithuania. The diary was published in 2023. His latest translation “A Voice from The Lost Town of Trochenbrod: A Translation of Yisrael Beider’s Poems, Essays, and Letters” will be published in January 2025.
Education
B.Sc. in Aeronautical Engineering, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, 1970
M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, 1975
M.A. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., 1976
Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., 1979