Frederick Reines was born in Paterson, New Jersey on March 16, 1918, the youngest of four children. His parents had met and married in New York City after emigrating to the U.S. from the same small town in Russia. Fred’s father ran a general store, and many of his childhood memories centered on this typical American country store and life in a small American town. Music was to become a lifelong interest. Fred’s scientific curiosity blossomed during his time in the Boy Scouts (he achieved the rank of Eagle Scout), where he began building crystal radios "from scratch." By high school his principal ambition, according to the yearbook, was “To be a physicist extraordinaire.” He received his undergraduate degree in engineering in 1939 and a Master of Science degree in mathematical physics in 1941 at Stevens Institute of Technology. It was during this period in 1940, that Fred married Sylvia.

While completing his doctorate at New York University in 1944, Fred was recruited by Richard Feynman to work on the Manhattan Project, shortly becoming a Group Leader in the Theoretical Division. Later, he served as director of the weapons and phenomonolgy portion of Operation Greenhouse, which consisted of a number of historically significant Atomic Energy Commission experiments on Eniwetok Atoll.

In the 1950s, Fred formed an extremely fruitful collaboration with Clyde Cowan to pursue detection of the neutrino. In 1956 at the Savannah River nuclear plant, their team observed the electron antineutrino. Reines was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics for that work.

Fred left Los Alamos in 1959 to become Professor and Head of the Department of Physics of the (then) Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, Ohio. He spent seven years there, working in reactor neutrino physics, double beta decay, and electron lifetime studies. In 1966, he moved to the newly built University of California campus at Irvine, where he became the founding dean of the School of Physical Sciences and where he remained for the rest of his professional career.

Fred’s physical stature, booming voice, and natural, imposing stage presence invariably commanded attention. However, his interactions with people, especially the students he taught, were usually warmed by his penchant for the lighthearted use of quips, puns, riddles and the poems he was ever so fond of fashioning and reciting.

Adapted from Les Prix Nobel . The Nobel Prizes 1995, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1996, and comments by former UCI colleagues, 1998.