Donald Lubowich, astrophysicist and professor emeritus at Hofstra University, dies at 77

Astrophysicist and renowned scientist Donald Lubowich was a Plainview professor who could explain the universe through music and at public events. And with cookies.

"Every one of our nephews and nieces asked Don to come to their school to do what he called edible astronomy," using what came to be known as the "Big Bang Chocolate Chip Cookie," said his wife, Susan Kopech. At schools and venues such as the Ronald McDonald House of Long Island, "he would put M & M's in cookie dough and show the kids, ‘Look, they're all bunched up in the middle.’ And then the cookie would expand when he baked it for them and you would see the M & M's all over the cookie," and in that way demonstrate the expansion of the universe.

Lubowich — a former senior scientist at the American Institute of Physics and an adjunct associate professor emeritus at Hempstead’s Hofstra University — died of gallbladder cancer on March 23 at NYU Langone Hospital – Long Island in Mineola. He was 77.

"He brought outer space down to earth," particularly as coordinator of Hofstra’s Astronomy Outreach Program, said Rabbi Jaimee Shalhevet, of Syosset’s North Shore Synagogue, which Lubowich and his wife attended. "All Don ever wanted to do was teach and help. Until his last dying day, he was donating things to the synagogue," including "telescopes, with training, so that we could study the stars and what God and the Bible said about them."

Donald Arthur Lubowich was born May 16, 1948, in Chicago, the eldest of three children of Martin Lubowich, who worked in the family clothing store business, and Shirley L. Abrams Lubowich. The family later moved to suburban Skokie, Illinois, where he graduated from Niles North High School in 1966.

Fascinated by outer space since a childhood visit to Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, Lubowich earned a 1970 bachelor of science degree in astronomy from Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. He went on to earn two master’s degrees at Columbia University and a third, as well as his doctorate, at New Mexico State University.

He married Kopech on June 30, 1974. The couple moved to Medford in 1976 and the following year to Woodbury, where they lived until making their home in Plainview around 2022.

Lubowich worked primarily at the Long Island office of the Washington, D.C.- and Maryland-based American Institute of Physics through the mid-2000s. He concurrently taught part-time at Hofstra beginning in 1980, retiring in 2023 though remaining astronomy outreach coordinator until this year.

"Don went all over the world using telescopes and he published in a lot of scientific journals,"  Kopech said. His "crowning glory," she said, was a paper co-authored with frequent colleague Jay Pasachoff in the journal Nature in 2000 that represented a breakthrough in the study of deuterium, one of the oldest forms of hydrogen created during the Big Bang.

Yet equally important to him was making astronomy friendly to children and adults alike. Under the auspices of Hofstra and a grant from NASA, he developed Music and Astronomy Under the Stars — bringing hands-on telescope viewing to parks, festivals and music venues all over Long Island and elsewhere, including Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island’s Newport Folk Festival.

In 2010, with Hofstra and with the Obama administration’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Lubowich spearheaded the creation of the annual Astronomy Festival on the National Mall, in Washington.

As a member of the International Astronomical Union, he served on numerous commissions and working groups, including the high-profile Public Naming of Planets and Planetary Satellites. He was in attendance in 2006 when Pluto was reclassified from planet to dwarf planet, a change he lobbied against.

That vote had taken place "at the end of the meeting when everybody was rushing to leave, and that was a rushed vote," contended Jason Cousins, president of the Amateur Observers Society of New York, with which Lubowich was affiliated for many years. "And he fought vociferously ever since to get Pluto back in" as a planet.

In his free time, "we loved to attend classical music concerts," Kopech said. "We had several subscriptions to the symphony and the opera." As well, "we loved to travel. We loved to attend lectures on all sorts of things. Don was interested in absolutely everything. There was probably nothing he wasn't curious about, and he had the ability to retain amazing amounts of facts."

Lubowich believed astronomy, Cousins said, "brings down the boundaries between race, color, religion ... because when you get people to look up for a moment and stop looking down, they recognize we're all the same people ... all on this rock that’s flying through space. We're all on this planet together."

In addition to his wife, Lubowich is survived by his mother, of Skokie, Illinois; sister, Renee Lubowich, of Massachusetts; and seven nieces and nephews. A brother, Kenneth Lubowich, predeceased him.

A funeral service was held March 27 at Gutterman’s Woodbury Chapel with burial at Wellwood Beth Moses Cemetery in West Babylon.