David Mildner, hailed globally as “Neutron Scattering’s 1^st Rock Star” at NCNR - the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center for Neutron Research - has died in Maryland aged 76 years.

David was brought up in Wimbledon and educated by the Jesuits at Donhead School and then at Wimbledon College, a prominent member of the “Class of ‘55” (not the US version with Elvis Presley and other ordinary world rockstars!); he eventually became a very popular and effective Head Boy in 1961, in a then rapidly changing social and academic world. Wimbledon was not then noted for emphasis on or excellence in the sciences, but, independent as always, David won a scholarship to Worcester College, Oxford, to read Physics in 1963, graduating well in 1966.

His family had emigrated to America during the Wimbledon College years, and David joined them after Oxford, in his own words “barely knowing his younger siblings”. This was the time of the draft for the Vietnam War, for which David was eligible, but fortunately (despite some rarely-mentioned-now commune lifestyle and mass D.C. protest marches) he escaped and subsequently entered graduate school at Ann Arbor, Michigan, working on such would-be Rock Star toys as nuclear research reactors, neutron and proton recoil generators and even a time-of-flight diffractometer. From 1973 -1977, back temporarily in England, he joined the Science Research Council at the Rutherford Laboratory, worked at Harwell, and contributed considerably to the design of the ISIS neutron source.

Disappointed that so little changed despite Britain’s joining of the (then) European Community, while he had changed so much, David returned to the USA, becoming associate Professor of Physics at the University of Missouri, teaching and continuing his researches, and also able to visit (professionally) atomic research sites in France and England.

For all his life the most “British” of characters, he was nevertheless obliged to become a US citizen in 1989 to be able to join NIST in Maryland, specialising (he once explained) on the characterisation and development of focusing concepts for cold neutrons, more latterly using capillary optics. He has been able to spread this gospel in France, Russia, the UK, Greece, Portugal, and India often as an International Atomic Energy Agency expert, as well as working on US Department of Energy review committees - it was just as well he loved travelling so much.

He kept playing and then refereeing rugby throughout all these years, formerly a referee in the Oxfordshire Society, and now in the Potomac Society, an activity which in the US involved long-distance, even inter-state, travel for any game, and consequently a very understanding domestic partner. David found this in his second wife, Maryanne, a NIST co-worker whom he proudly described as an an artist, a former hippie who went to Woodstock, but whom he had somehow failed to meet during his Washington protesting period. They lived close to NIST, and even after retirement, David visited, taught, reminisced and consulted there until very recently, still publishing learned papers.

David’s health and lifestyle was badly impaired by cancer episodes, and then tragically by the onset of Parkinson’s Disease in the last two years. His beloved travelling was curtailed, and he relied more and more on Maryanne, although his brain was still sharp enough to challenge and rail at fake news and cartoon-villain politicians, at home and in the UK.

Obviously his former classmates didn’t have a monopoly on claiming David as “one of us” - certainly, most of us don’t understand a single word written of his Rock Star status and achievements. He was, though, and remains, “one of us”, “a great bloke”, “a class act”, in many ways a misfit (such as being a British American, a rugby-pitch Professor, or indeed, a scientific Rock Star) but one who was always welcome, who always fitted in, who belonged among us.