Ronald Charles (Ron) Newman was one of the most versatile semiconductor physicists of his generation and is distinguished for his work in several different areas, most notably epitaxial growth and the behaviour of impurities and dopants in a range of device-related materials, mainly silicon and gallium arsenide. His most significant contributions came from the application of local vibrational-mode spectroscopy to studies of the segregation and diffusion of oxygen and hydrogen in silicon. The results were of fundamental importance in the fabrication of integrated circuits.