Obituary of Mark F. Mergen

Dr. Mark Frederick Mergen died 2/11/15 in Mt. Kisco, NY after battling stage 4 pancreatic cancer for over two years. He was born 5/18/37 in Madison, Wisconsin and attended the Gaston one-room country schoolhouse in Cottage Grove, WI for eight years. After two years at Madison East HS, he transferred to the Academy of the New Church in Bryn Athyn, PA. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a BS in Math and a MD degree, he interned at Philadelphia General Hospital. While at UW he was a graduate assistant in UW's Numerical Analysis Lab (precursor to UW's computer science department). During his schooling he served for six years in the Army Reserve. His intellectual curiosity and love of computing led him to leave his medical internship and work at RCA as a computer specialist. He later joined IBM where he worked for 45 years, beginning as a customer engineer in Philadelphia; then a developer in Bethesda, MD; followed by joining IBM's Yorktown Heights, NY Research Division as a research computer scientist and later manager. His innovations advanced computer technology in areas such as 64-bit memory, recoverable file systems, Java virtual machines, transaction memory, multi-system scheduling, power architecture, and security. He received many patents and awards including best paper awards. In his final IBM years he worked on the Watson medical project utilizing his medical expertise. He had an intense love of music that included playing his trombone in Madison East's HS marching band and attending summer music camps. Throughout his life he performed with amateur orchestras and in recent years was a member of the Doctors Orchestral Society of NY. He also was a chorus member of NY's Master's Singers and the Westchester Oratorio Society. He loved attending operas, ballets and classical music concerts. Mark was a loving and deeply committed family man who is survived by his wife Anna; daughter Katrina; brothers Paul, Philip, and Peter; and sisters Mary and Marcia. A service will be held later in Glenview, Illinois at the church where he and his wife were married 50 years ago. For those who wish, donations can be made to the Boston Foundation for Sight in Needham Heights, MA (www.bostonsight.org).