Ernst K. Zinner

Zinner had mantle cell lymphoma for the last 19 years of his life. He died on 30 July 2015 at the age of 78.

Zinner continued to work at the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences for the rest of his career, in 1989 being named as a Research Professor of Physics and Earth and Planetary Sciences. He retired early in 2015.

While on sabbatical later in his career, he met Brigitte Wopenka, a faculty member of the Institute of Analytical Chemistry in Vienna. She returned with him to the United States and they married in 1980. They had a son, Max Giacobini Zinner. The son now lives in New York City.

Since 1974, Zinner's research has involved Ion microprobe analysis. He has worked with the Cameca IMS 3f instrument since 1982, and the Cameca NanoSIMS instrument since 2000. He led the Long Duration Exposure Facility. Zinner was instrumental in identifying, for the first time, material in meteorites that pre-dated the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. Zinner and his colleagues found minute amounts of stardust - diamond and silicon carbide - that originated outside the solar system. Identification of these grains involved a measurement technique called secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS). Zinner and Ghislaine Crozaz expanded the use of SIMS to examine rare earth elements and applied this new technique to measure rare earth elements in thin sections of rocks and minerals.

Zinner obtained an undergraduate degree in physics from the Vienna University of Technology and started working. In the mid-1960s, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri to attend Washington University for graduate work. He earned his Ph.D. there in 1972 in high energy physics.

Ernst Kunibert Zinner (30 January 1937 – 30 July 2015) was an Austrian astrophysicist, known for his pioneering work in the analysis of stardust in the laboratory. He long had a position in the United States at the Laboratory for Space Physics (later part of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences) at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he had earned his doctorate. He came to the United States in the 1960s for graduate work. In addition, Zinner regularly taught at European universities, and other American institutions.

Zinner was born on 30 January 1937 at Steyr, Austria, a small town about 100 miles west of Vienna. Although his father, Kunibert Zinner, was a renowned sculptor, Ernst was more interested as a boy in nature and science. Zinner's four younger siblings, and other relatives, live in Austria.