His mother was an American painter, Lucy Dodd Ramberg (née Dodd), and his father a German archaeologist, Walter Ramberg. His father was killed while serving in World War I.
Ramberg and his mother moved from Italy to Munich for the remainder of World War I, and in 1920 they moved to his mother’s family home in Portland, Oregon.
He graduated from Lincoln High School in 1922. He was granted his Doctor of Philosophy in 1932.
He was the uncle of Mario Capecchi, a 2007 Nobel laureate. That year he enrolled in Reed College, but two years later he transferred to Cornell University. During the years 1925 to 1927, he took a hiatus and worked for Bausch & Lomb on optical computing.
Upon receipt of his bachelor"s degree from Cornell in 1928, he stayed at the University to work with Floyd K. Richtmyer.
In 1930, Ramberg went to study with Arnold Sommerfeld at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. Upon return to the United States from Munich, Ramberg returned to Cornell and continued the work on which he based his thesis: X-ray satellites and line widths.
In 1935, he left Cornell to take a position at Radio Corporation of America to work on both theoretical and experimental work on secondary emission, pickup tubes, and field electron emission. He later took part in the development of the theory of thermoelectric refrigeration and image tube aberrations and in demonstrating the mathematical operability of a multistage electrostatic electron multiplier.
He also took part in construction of one of the first electron microscopes in the mid-1940s.
He remained at Radio Corporation of America until 1972. In addition to working at Radio Corporation of America, he was a visiting professor at the University of Munich in 1949 and, he was a Fulbright lecturer at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt 1960-1961. In addition to co-authoring a number of books, he also translated Electrodynamik, Arnold Sommerfeld’s third volume in his six-volume Lectures on Theoretical Physics.
1957 – Elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society 1964 – David Sarnoff Outstanding Team Award in Science from Radio Corporation of America 1972 – David Sarnoff Award (co-sponsored by Radio Corporation of America and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) for his work on electron optics, electron physics, and television 1989 – Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize from the Society for Information Display Fellow of the Institute of Radio Engineers Fellow of the American Physical Society.
