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1940 – 2020
The tie, exactly: Donald Nestor Heirman was born August 16, 1940, in Mishawaka and raised here — a quiet recovery the general compilations miss entirely. His father was a foreman at Uniroyal, the U.S. Rubber company whose plant the Ball Band fragment of this build carries; the son's record belongs to a different world, and the Schools section already counts him among Mishawaka High School's notable graduates.
The course: Heirman took his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering at Purdue (1962 and 1963) and spent more than thirty years at Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, where he founded and managed the corporation's Global Product Compliance Laboratory. His field — electromagnetic compatibility, the discipline that keeps the world's electronics from interfering with one another — knew him by an officeholder's nickname: Mr. EMC Standards. He was president of the IEEE EMC Society (1980–81), president of the IEEE Standards Association (2005–06), chairman of CISPR, the International Electrotechnical Commission's special committee on radio interference, and chairman of the IEC's advisory committee on EMC. The honors at the end of the course match the offices: the IEC's Lord Kelvin Award in 2008, the IEEE's Charles Proteus Steinmetz Award, and its Richard M. Emberson Award in 2018. He retired from Bell Labs in 1997 and founded Don Heirman Consultants; he taught electromagnetic-compatibility measurement at Purdue and served as associate director for wireless EMC at the University of Oklahoma. Alongside the engineering ran a naval career: he retired from the U.S. Navy as a commander in 1985.
The end: Heirman died October 30, 2020, at Lincroft, New Jersey, aged 80, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery — a Mishawaka rubber foreman's son laid in the nation's ground on a record made entirely of standards he wrote for the world.
Sources:
- ANSI (American National Standards Institute), memorial notice, November 2, 2020 (birth at Mishawaka; Bell Labs course; CISPR and IEC chairs; awards)
- IEEE Foundation and Engineering and Technology History Wiki, Heirman biography (IEEE offices; Purdue degrees; Navy retirement; Arlington burial)