About Dr. Siegfried Knorr

Dr. Siegfried G. Knorr, 65, Founder and CEO of Colby Instruments, Inc., designer of the world's fastest high precision measurement instruments, passed away on March 20, 2005 of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakobs Disease. He was the holder of many patents. Dr. Knorr is known for his highly innovative designs (such as the programmable microwave and RF delay lines and modules series), which are still unsurpassed in the world today for its performance and functionality.

He was a gifted teacher and mentor, and former professor in the Henry Samueli School of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Throughout the years, he has sponsored students from Germany for specialized studies and laboratory experience in high-frequency electronics. His former students now hold industry and university leadership positions in the United States and Europe.

Dr. Knorr was born in Germany, studied at Oxford and Bristol Universities in the United Kingdom, earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering at the Fachhochschule Furtwagen in the Black Forest in Germany, and his MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, CA. His early work experiences were in TV and communications in Bremen and Wihelmshaven in Germany, and at the Royal Air Force Airbase in Jever, Germany. Prior to his teaching and research at UCLA, he was an electronic design engineer at Tektronix, Inc., Portland, OR.

He is recognized as a brilliant scientist of high integrity, friend and colleague, and a loving husband, father, grandfather, brother, son.  He is survived by his devoted wife, Betty Chang Knorr; his daughters, Katherine Knorr and Rena Chinn; his son-in-law, Victor Chinn; his grandchildren Joshua and Rebecca Chinn; as well as his sister and brother-in-law, Inge and Franz Cornelius; his sister Gitta Andersen, and other loving relatives in Germany.