John E. Mack, a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer and Cambridge psychiatrist who researched victims of alien encounters, died after being hit a by a car on September 27. He was 74.

Mack, who graduated from Harvard Medical School (HMS) in 1955, was the author of 11 books, including his acclaimed biography of T.E. Lawrence—better known as Lawrence of Arabia—entitled “A Prince of Our Disorder.”

He founded the department of psychiatry at The Cambridge Hospital in the late 1960s and became a professor of psychiatry at HMS in 1972.

Mack later founded Cambridge Hospital’s Center for Psychology and Social Change—renamed the John Mack Institute in the summer of 2004—to explore “consciousness and transformation,” according to the group’s website.

Mack’s research focused on people who had gone through life-changing or traumatic experiences, including those he called “experiencers” of alien encounters.

Mack’s sister, Mary Lee Ingbar of Cambridge, Mass., said that her brother’s research demonstrated his fascination with how people respond to trauma that is hard for others to understand. “When you look at his career and all his interests, he was a person with great curiosity and great empathy, and a willingness to pursue the interests of his heart with unrelenting vigor.”

Colleagues in the John Mack Institute stated that through Mack’s clinical care of people who have survived disturbing events, he found his own sense of spiritual enrichment. Mack dedicated his last book, “Passport to the Cosmos,” published in 1999, “To the experiencers, who have been my teachers.”

HMS Professor of Neurobiology Edward A. Kravitz met Mack at the September 2003 Harvard Mind, Brain, Behavior Junior Symposium: “Schizophrenia, Dreams, and Alien Encounters.”

Kravitz described Mack as “a really lively, engaging and fascinating man. He was controversial, but highly intelligent, very articulate, and just plain fun to be with.”

Mack died Sept. in London, England after he was struck by a driver as he was returning from the T. E. Lawrence Society Symposium at Oxford.

In addition to his sister, Mack is survived by his ex-wife Sally Stahl; three sons—Daniel, of Boulder, Colo., Kenneth, of Almaty, Kazakhstan and Tony, of Cambridge; and two grandchildren.

Ernst Mayr

Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, often called the “Darwin of the 20th century,” died Feb. 3 at his retirement community in Bedford, Mass. He was 100.

Mayr, who was born in Kempten, Germany, in 1904, was a member of the Harvard faculty for over half a century. He joined the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) as Agassiz Professor of Zoology in 1953 after holding a position at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Mayr was most renowned for his work in the field of evolutionary biology; he integrated Darwin’s theory of natural selection and Mendel’s theory of heredity to form the neo-Darwinist evolutionary synthesis that is still widely accepted today.