Norbert M. Bikales

Norbert M. Bikales was born to a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany. Under the threat of persecution and death from the Nazi regime, his parents Salomon and Bertha Bikales sent him at age 10 in 1939 on a Kindertransport to France. There the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) arranged for him to be sheltered in a children's home in Chabannes in the Creuse region and other homes. Later he was helped to escape to neutral Switzerland. His parents were deported to Poland and killed in the Holocaust. After World War II, at age 17, Dr. Bikales emigrated to the USA, where he studied chemistry at City College of New York and Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. He worked as a research chemist for American Cyanamid and other companies and became a professor of chemistry and director of continuing education in science at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He served as director of the polymers program of the National Science Foundation from 1976 to 1995. He also was head of the European office of the National Science Foundation located in Paris, from 1995. In 1951, he married Gerda V. Bierzonski, with whom he had two children. Dr. Bikales is the author/editor of several books on his speciality, polymer science.