“Jerry championed it,” said Mary Schuff, Craig’s mother. “He didn’t tell us until he knew it was done.

“We are amazingly touched. Craig worked so hard for this, so it is really kind of neat to see that the goal he had for so long is (reached). Everyone worked so hard for him to get whatever he needed to do this, especially the university. Whatever they could do to make it happen, they did,” she said.

“It’s also very hard because he is not here to see it,” she said. “I truly hope Craig will be able to know this, somehow, and he would be very pleased.”

The hope now, said Rick Schuff, Craig’s father, is that “someone could pick up where he left off, put together the device and continue on it. It will take someone with a graduate level interest to do that, and we would be excited and supportive of it.”

Where “he left off” was with neutron generation from a device that could be used to scan packages and detect clandestine materials, such as chemicals or nuclear materials.

Kulcinski has described Schuff’s research as an exceptionally promising concept and Schuff the student as “an experimentalist.