PhD 1969
Dr. Tannenbaum received a Ph.D. in solid state physics from
New York University in 1969. He worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories from
1969 to 1974 doing research in optics and Color Picturephone where he
developed his love of color. He joined the Engineering physics Laboratory
at DuPont in 1974 and has been there until present working under the
mentorship of the late C. D. Reilly on color instrumentation, chromatic
adaptation, metamerism indices, and improvements to Kubelka Monk theory. He
co-developed the three-angle spectrophotometric colorimeter now
manufactured by X-Rite Corporation and used to control the manufacture of
all automotive finishes.
For the past ten years , he has been defining measurement methods for many of the surface appearance attributes of various DuPont products and is the inventor of an appearance instrument which uses the optical transfer function to assess the mirror-like quality and texture properties of finishes. The latter is currently marketed as the BYK-Gardner Wave Scan-DOI Instrument. He is currently Co-Chairman of ASTM Subcommittee E12.14-Mutlidimentional Characterization of Appearance and a volunteer curator at Hagley Museum which presides over the historic ISCC/Hagley color collection.