Ed Ronat was born in Galatz, Rumania in 1932 and immigrated to Israel in 1940. He served in the Israeli Navy from 1950 to 1952. Ed received a B.Sc. from M.I.T. Cambridge, Mass. in 1956. He attended graduate school at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. where he received a M.A. degree in 1958 and a Ph.D. degree in Physics in 1962. From 1962 to 1964 Ed hold the appointment of Instructor and Research Fellow in the Faculty of Physics at the Harvard University.
In 1964 Ed joined the experimental particle physics group of the Nuclear Physics Department at the Weizmann Institute. During 1964-1966 he was a Research Associate at M.I.T., representing the Weizmann Institute in collaboration experiments with the Cambridge Bubble Chamber Group. In 1966 Ed returned to Israel as a Senior Scientist in the Nuclear Physics Department. He brought with him the most modern computer programs available at the time and planned and wrote many of them by himself. Ed was an expert in the area and controlled the whole computing part of the group.
Ed's scientific work was concentrated in the field of experimental high energy physics. He participated in experiments in heavy liquid bubble chambers, hydrogen and deuterium bubble chambers and hybrid spectrometer systems. He studied photoproduction, pion-proton, proton-proton and proton-deuteron reactions in the energy range 1-12 GeV. Ed spent short periods of time (2 weeks – 2 months) on scientific collaborations and data taking at M.I.T., Brookhaven National Laboratory, SLAC, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The highlight of his work in the early 1970s was to establish the Spiral Reader system. He was responsible of the whole software of the system in which the group managed within few years to measure almost one million collisions of elementary particles with the Bubble Chamber technique.
In 1971 Ed was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor at the Weizmann Institute. He spent the academic year 1972/73 on sabbatical leave at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
At the end of the 1970s the experimental particle physics group joined the electron-positron colliding beam experiment TASSO at the PETRA collider in DESY, Hamburg, Germany. Ed planned, wrote and was responsible for a huge computer program called MONSTER, which was a simulation program for the whole TASSO detector. During 1980 he received a Minerva Fellowship for 4 months, which he spent at DESY, working on the TASSO e+e- experiment.
Ed passed away in 1989 and is survived by his wife Judith and his 3 children.