Kem Holland Cook
February 18, 1949 - June 23, 2024
On Sunday, June 23rd, Kem Holland Cook, a beloved husband and father, passed away peacefully in his home in San Ramon at age 75. He leaves behind a wife, daughter, two grandchildren, and an illustrious career in astronomy.
His greatest research contributions to the field of astronomy were in the development of large, digital mosaic imagers and large data reduction pipelines. These were ground-breaking achievements in the early 1990s. He was a member of the Lab team that led the search for galactic dark matter in the form of Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) and later a member of the Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS), which looked for distant, rare objects in our own solar system. He also collaborated on a very large project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. This project will come to fruition in 2025, when it will take digital images of the entire visible southern sky every few nights, revealing unprecedented details of the universe and helping unravel some of its greatest mysteries. According to a press release about the telescope, "during a 10-year time frame, this telescope will detect about 20 billion galaxies - the first time a telescope will observe more galaxies than there are people on Earth - and will create a time-lapse "movie" of the sky."
Kem Holland Cook was born in Laramie, Wyoming and grew up in Bozeman, Montana. He was the only son of two doting parents, William Boyd Cook of Amarillo, Texas and Romerta (Fox) Cook of Fruitdale, South Dakota. He had a happy childhood playing outdoors in Bozeman, and often described it fondly to his family. He said that it was looking at the night sky in Bozeman that made him want to be an astronomer from a young age.
Kem Cook loved the outdoors and appreciated mountains, woods, and fields by hiking, backpacking, and bicycling. He was also an appreciator of travel, fine food, and the arts. Although he was generally not inclined toward urban life, his favorite vacations were always to Paris, France, where he enjoyed walking all over the city and feasting on fine cuisine. He was an atheist, but he was very attentive to the natural world, celebrating the solstices and equinoxes with ritual. He was a dog lover, and he adored his childhood dog, Herkimer (Herk), and two family dogs as part of his adult life: Godiva and Theobromine (Theo).
Education and learning were important to Kem throughout his life. He attended Dartmouth College and Stanford University for his undergraduate degree and went on to earn two PhDs: one from Stanford University in biophysics (1977) and the other from the University of Arizona in astronomy (1987), which led to a long career in the field.
He met his first wife, Jeanne Finberg, during his time at Stanford and they were married in 1980, moved to Tucson for his PhD, and had their only child, Keegan Cook Finberg, in 1984. He moved to Orinda, California in 1989 to work for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he continued to work until he retired. Kem and Jeanne divorced in 2000. Kem married Susan Unger in 2004, and they moved to Danville briefly and then settled in San Ramon, California.
He is survived by his wife Susan Unger, daughter Keegan Cook Finberg, her husband Andy Hines, and two grandchildren, Zev Wilton Finberg-Hines and Muriel Harriet Finberg-Hines. He is also survived by stepsiblings, siblings-in-law, and many nieces and nephews.
Donations in Kem Cook's memory may be sent to Planned Parenthood of Northern California or the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano Counties.