Roger White was born on the 11th of January 1939, in Llwynypia, in the mining valleys of South Wales, UK. In 1955 at 16, he left his village of Llantwit Major in South Glamorgan after winning a five-year Student Apprenticeship at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, England.
At Harwell from 1955-1960, he trained as an electrical engineer while simultaneously attending Oxford Polytechnic, where he was awarded Higher National Certificates in both Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. AERE employed him in the Plasma Physics Division after he completed his apprenticeship. For AERE he worked on high-voltage switching, first at Harwell and then at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Culham Laboratory, when it opened in 1962.
In 1964 Roger immigrated to Canada with his family, and spent a year working on satellite systems for RCA in Montreal. He returned to high-voltage engineering at Ion Physics in Boston, where he was first introduced to nuclear-weapons simulators in the form of flash X-ray and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) systems.
Roger joined Maxwell Laboratories in San Diego, California, in 1967 and began a 35-year relationship with that company. Roger worked with many of the original thinkers in the field of pulsed power, including Alan Kolb, Richard Fitch, Richard Miller, John Shannon, John Harrison, Bob Hunter and Jorg Jansen. He made contributions to the Blackjack series of simulators for the Defense Nuclear Agency, and EMP generators for the US Department of Defense and foreign governments. This led to field installation and commissioning of systems such as Casino at NSWC White Oak, Maryland, Empress II at Little Creek, Virginia, and systems in France and Germany. During this period, Roger made regular trips to Texas Tech University in order to recruit future graduates for work at Maxwell.
At the same time, Roger managed up to forty people as Vice President in the Maxwell Engineering Department. This matrix organization prompted Roger to market and manage programs within the group, as well as to support the engineering needs of the entire company. His last major assignment before Maxwell sold its pulsed power systems business was to manage its group in Albuquerque and win a large contract at the Air Force Research Laboratory.
After the purchase by Titan Corporation in 2001 and Titan's purchase by L-3 Communications in 2005, Roger directed the operation of the L-3 Pulse Sciences group in San Diego, originally Maxwell's pulsed-power group. There the work changed somewhat to high-average-power systems such as particle accelerator hardware for the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge. But Roger was a loyal Maxwell Old Boy to the end.
Roger chaired the 1991 IEEE Pulse Power Conference and co-chaired the 1994 BEAMS conference, both in San Diego. In 2011 in Chicago, he won the IEEE Peter Haas Pulsed Power Award “For Outstanding Contributions to Pulsed Power Technology in Developing Programs of Research, Education and Information Exchange.” He served on the IEEE Pulse Power committee for twenty years and was Awards Committee Chairman in 1997 in Baltimore. He continued to work and be involved in his field until he was 73. He attended his last technical conference in San Francisco in 2013.
He died on January 9, 2018, just two days before his 79th birthday. He is survived by his wife Julia Roth, his son Matthew and daughter-in-law Sherry, his sister Janet and brother-in-law David Knaggs, nieces Kate and Rebecca, three great-nephews, cousins in the UK and US, and former wife Gillian Ackland. His parents Percy and Annie predeceased him. His elder son Michael died in 1999.