| American physicist, b. Redondo Beach, Calif., graduated from the . California Institute of Technology, 1928, Ph.D. Princeton, 1932. On the faculty of the Univiversity of California since 1932, he was appointed professor of physics in 1946 and director of the Lawrence
Radiation
Laboratory (now the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory) in 1958. With
P. H. Abelson
he discovered
neptunium
(element 93) and with
Glenn Seaborg
nd others,
plutonium
(element 94). For his work on the chemistry of the transuranium elements he shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with
Seaborg
. He also contributed to microwave radar and sonar, and to the design of particle accelerators. He worked (1942-45) on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. |