Professor Emeritus Konstantin “Dino” Goulianos, age 90, peacefully passed away on Friday, January 2, 2026, at Mount Sinai West Hospital in New York City, with his wife Karen Grahn-Goulianos by his side.

A Celebration of Life service in New York City will be held at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 21, at the Church of the Ascension (5th Avenue & 10th Street).  A Celebration of Life service will also be held at 11:00 a.m. with visitation beginning at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, April 25, at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Atwater.  Arrangements are entrusted to the Peterson Brothers Atwater Funeral Home. A physics symposium will also be held in his honor at The Rockefeller University at a future date. www.petersonbrothers.com

In 1987, Dino met Karen Grahn of Atwater, Minnesota, through mutual friends. It was the beginning of a loving path lasting nearly 40 years, marked indelibly by their mutual devotion: an opera singer married to a physicist. They began their married life in April of 1990 in New York City. Together, they traveled to many countries where Dino gave physics talks at conferences and Karen often sang at the banquets.

Born in Thessaloniki, Greece, on November 9, 1935, Dino studied chemistry at the University of Thessaloniki. He came to the United States in 1958 on a Fulbright Scholarship to Columbia University, getting his master’s and doctoral degrees in physics there. He was at Princeton University for seven years, holding positions of instructor and assistant professor. Dino then joined the faculty of The Rockefeller University in 1971 as associate professor at the invitation of pioneering particle physicist Rodney Cool as part of a newly founded group of experimental physicists and was promoted to professor in 1981. After 49 years, Dino retired as head of the Laboratory of Experimental High Energy Physics.

As a graduate student at Columbia University, Dino helped build a detector at Brookhaven National Laboratory that confirmed the existence of the previously theorized muon neutrino. In 1988, he traveled to Stockholm with his thesis advisors when they accepted the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery.

Over many decades, Dino conducted experiments on subatomic particles using the world’s most powerful accelerators both in the U.S. and abroad, and he and his lab designed and built exquisitely sensitive instruments that made this kind of work possible. With his colleagues, Goulianos carried out experiments that helped establish the theoretical framework that spells out the elementary components of matter and the interactions between them, known as the Standard Model. His work with the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) contributed to the 1995 discovery of the top quark, the heaviest and last of the quarks to be experimentally confirmed.

The Goulianos lab also contributed to the international Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and participated in the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson and field which gives mass to elementary particles. The Higgs discovery marked the end of a half-century’s search by thousands of scientists around the world and was recognized with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013.

Dino was also highly regarded for his research on diffractive scattering, in which one or both colliding particles remain intact. He made numerous important measurements on diffraction in experiments at both Fermilab and CERN and established a phenomenological model to describe this type of interaction at high energies in hadron colliders.

“Surrounded by biologists, Dino embraced his outlier role and participated fully in the Rockefeller University community, where he was known as a warm, outgoing colleague who carried his brilliance lightly,” says Richard P. Lifton, Rockefeller’s president.

Daily, Dino commuted from his home near Central Park West on his 3-speed bike across the park over to The Rockefeller University. He enjoyed taking long swims, running marathons (16), alpine skiing, windsurfing, and snowboarding; he even invented a smooth brake for rollerblades. In Greece, as a teenager, he was a member of a prize-winning rowing team.

Dino had a gift for learning languages. After WWII, he wanted to learn German so he could get a teaching job in Germany; his teacher was a Russian woman who filled out his Fulbright papers by spelling his first name the Russian way (Konstantin) instead of the Greek way (Constantine). He learned Italian while on the ship from Italy to the U.S. He learned English when he went to the orientation program for Columbia’s foreign students. When Russian physicists came to Fermilab in the early 70s, he learned Russian in order to better communicate with the scientists and their spouses. Whenever he learned a new language, he usually figured out how to tell a joke or sing a song in that language, which were a couple of his favorite ways to communicate in any language.

Dino could be utterly focused, driven, and relentless. If you disagreed with him, you needed a very strong argument. One colleague said he needed to plan for extra time when having a meeting with Dino. He was a generous teacher and earned much loyalty from the members of his laboratory.

He could also entertain his colleagues and friends by playing guitar and singing -- he would say he knew a Greek song for any word. Wherever Dino went, he made life-long friends. Many will remember his ability to get to the bottom of a problem and creatively solve it -- after much lively discussion, of course.

In the kitchen, Dino was a “one-pot” cook. Because of his chemistry background, he knew just when to combine foods so that everything cooked together just right, without leftovers. Easy cleanup. He also had a pretty good green thumb. When Karen met him, he had an avocado plant in his living room that was seven feet across and six feet tall that he had nurtured from a seed.

One of his former students wrote: “Dino was a friend, a mentor, and a truly larger-than-life personality. It’s hard to think of a conference dinner that didn’t include Dino singing or starting a dance line. He was deeply passionate about physics, endlessly inventive, and always ready for an adventure. Some of my most cherished memories, though, are of Dino enthusiastically explaining the finer points of diffraction physics to my young daughters. He will be greatly missed.”

Dino is survived by his wife, Karen Grahn-Goulianos; his brother-in-law Gary Grahn and Lori of Atwater, MN; nephew-in-law Darron, great-nieces and nephews Giselle, Naya, Gradyn and Samuel; step-mother-in-law Lynne Grahn, and numerous other relatives in Karen’s Minnesota family. In Greece, he is survived by several cousins and their children.

He was preceded in death by his parents, Achilles and Olga Goulianos; two sisters, Pipina and Aspasia; nephew Achilles and niece Maria; mother- and father-in-law Donna and Glenn Grahn; and nephew-in-law Eric Grahn.