Dr. Manfred Kurt Fink

Dr. Manfred Fink died quietly in his sleep on November 16, in Austin, Texas. He was born August 16, 1937, to Kurt and Auguste Fink in Berlin, Germany. His mother and father were both from Speyer, Germany, and lived in Berlin during the war. Kurt was a librarian in Berlin, but died near Kolomak in Ukraine while training new soldiers at the front.

He spent the balance of World War II in Berlin with his mother and two siblings. In the last days of the war, the family fled the Russians and walked from Berlin to rejoin her family in Speyer with only the clothes on their backs. He later graduated from secondary school in Speyer and went on to obtain his PhD in physics in Karlsruhe.

After completing his PhD, Manfred, his wife, Ingrid and his two sons Klaus and Rainer, came to Bloomington, Indiana, where he had accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Indiana. Two years later, the family relocated to Austin, Texas, where he pursued his passion as a professor of physics at the University of Texas for over five

Manfred was an experimentalist working on atomic and molecular structure, using scattering electrons from atomic and molecular beams to study the properties of atoms and molecules. Later in his career, he designed an experiment attempting to measure the mass of electron-type neutrinos. Prof. Fink was APS Fellow and twice received a Humboldt Research award. Over his career, he supervised more than 20 PhD students. He joined the faculty at UT in 1970 and retired in 2020.

Manfred and his wife were long time members of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Austin.

Manfred is survived by his wife of 61 years, Ingrid, his sons Klaus and Rainer, daughters-in-law Denise and Tami, and 4 grandsons, Kristoff, Markus, Michael, and Stephen.

A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. on November 24, at Cook-Walden Funeral Home at 6100 North Lamar in Austin.