Lee Grodzins (born July 10, 1926) is an American professor emeritus of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). [1] After work as a researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Grodzins joined the faculty of MIT, where he taught physics for nearly four decades. He was also head of R&D for Niton Corporation, which developed devices to detect dangerous contaminants and contraband. He wrote more than 150 technical papers and holds more than 60 US patents. [2] [3]
Grodzins was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of David Melvin Grodzins and his wife Taube Grodzins, Jewish emigrants, with roots in Poland and Grodno, Belarus. [4] The family settled in Manchester, New Hampshire. [2] He graduated with a BS degree in engineering in 1946 from the University of New Hampshire. [5] He began his career with General Electric as an assistant in the nuclear physics group at their research laboratory in Schenectady, New York. [1] He earned his PhD in physics at Purdue University in 1954 and taught for a year afterwards at Purdue. [6] [7]
From 1955 to 1958, Grodzins was a researcher with the nuclear physics group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, probing the properties of the nuclei of atoms. In 1956 he married a biologist whom he met at Brookhaven, Lulu née Anderson (1929– 2019). [2] [8] The same year, together with Maurice Goldhaber and Andrew Sunyar , Grodzins performed an experiment that determined that neutrinos have negative helicity. This work was important in our understanding of the weak interaction. [6] Grodzins joined the faculty of the physics department of MIT in 1959 and was a professor of physics there from 1966 to 1998. In 1985, he carried out the first computer axial tomographic experiment using synchrotron radiation. [1]
Meanwhile, in 1987, he co-founded and led research and development at Niton Corporation, which developed, manufactured and marketed test kits and instruments to measure radon gas in buildings and toxic elements, such as lead. [6] [9] There he also developed handheld devices that use X-ray fluorescence to determine the composition of metal alloys and to detect other materials. [6] In 1998, he left MIT to work full-time directing the R&D group at Niton, and in 2005, he and his family sold Niton. [10] His sister Ethel Grodzins Romm was the President and CEO of Niton, [11] followed by his son Hal. [12] Grodzins also developed devices to detect explosives, drugs and other contraband in luggage and cargo containers. [6] Four of his devices earned R&D 100 awards, given annually by R&D Magazine to the 100 most innovative technical products in the US. [1] [13]
Grodzins wrote more than 150 technical papers and holds more than 50 US patents. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1964–65 and in 1971–72, and a Senior Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in 1980–81. [1] He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Purdue University in 1998. [6] He is a founding member of the Union of Concerned Scientists and was its president in 1972. [1] In 1999, he founded Cornerstones of Science, a public library initiative to help children and adults explore science. He serves as its president. [5] MIT named the Lee Grodzins Postdoctoral Fellows Lecture Award for him. [14]
His sister Anne Grodzins Lipow was a librarian and library science expert, [15] and his sister Ethel was an author, project manager, CEO and co-chair of the Lyceum Society of the New York Academy of Sciences. [4] [11]
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Upton, Long Island, and was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base and Japanese internment camp. Its name stems from its location within the Town of Brookhaven, approximately 60 miles east of New York City. It is managed by Stony Brook University and Battelle Memorial Institute.
Isidor Isaac Rabi was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, which is used in magnetic resonance imaging. He was also one of the first scientists in the United States to work on the cavity magnetron, which is used in microwave radar and microwave ovens.
Edward Mills Purcell was an American physicist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance in liquids and in solids. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) has become widely used to study the molecular structure of pure materials and the composition of mixtures. Friends and colleagues knew him as Ed Purcell.
Raymond Davis Jr. was an American chemist and physicist. He is best known as the leader of the Homestake experiment in the 1960s-1980s, which was the first experiment to detect neutrinos emitted from the Sun; for this he shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Henry Way Kendall was an American particle physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990 jointly with Jerome Isaac Friedman and Richard E. Taylor "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics."
Maurice Goldhaber was an American physicist, who in 1957 established that neutrinos have negative helicity.
John A. Rogers is a physical chemist and a materials scientist. He is currently the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Neurological Surgery at Northwestern University.
Joseph J. Romm is an American researcher, author, editor, physicist and climate expert, who advocates reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming and increasing energy security through energy efficiency and green energy technologies. Romm is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2009, Rolling Stone magazine named Romm to its list of "100 People Who Are Changing America", and Time magazine named him one of its "Heroes of the Environment (2009)", calling him "The Web's most influential climate-change blogger".
Robert Loren Jaffe is an American physicist and the Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was formerly director of the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.
G. Norris Glasoe was an American nuclear physicist. He was a member of the Columbia University team which was the first in the United States to verify the European discovery of the nuclear fission of uranium via neutron bombardment. During World War II, he worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. He was a physicist and administrator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Mark S. Lundstrom is an American electrical engineering researcher, educator, and author. He is known for contributions to the theory, modeling, and understanding of semiconductor devices, especially nanoscale transistors, and as the creator of the nanoHUB, a major online resource for nanotechnology. Lundstrom is Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in 2020 served as Acting Dean of the College of Engineering at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Anne Lipow was a prominent librarian who worked at the University of California, Berkeley Libraries. In 1992, she retired from Berkeley and started the Library Solutions Institute and Press.
Dmitri E. Kharzeev is an American theoretical physicist most notable for his work on the chiral magnetic effect.
Ethel Grodzins Romm was an American author, journalist, project manager and environmental technology company CEO. She also served as Co-Chair of the Lyceum Society of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Ady Hershcovitch is a plasma physicist best known for his 1995 invention, the plasma window, which was later patented.. In the plasma window, a plasma separates air from a vacuum by preventing the air from rushing into the vacuum. This scientific development can facilitate non-vacuum ion material modification, manufacturing of superalloys, and high-quality non-vacuum electron-beam welding. The device has been compared to the force field in the Star Trek TV series. He is well known for his work in plasma physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He has over 80 publications and 15 patents.
Ali Suphi Argon was a Turkish-American engineer, and the Quentin Berg Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Leslie Ann Kolodziejski is an American professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She works on fabricating novel photonic devices after synthesizing the constituent material via molecular-beam epitaxy. She is a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation and is a fellow of The Optical Society.
John William Negele is an American theoretical nuclear physicist.
Arthur Kent Kerman was a Canadian-American nuclear physicist, a fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. He was a professor emeritus of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) and Laboratory for Nuclear Science He was known for his work on the theory of the structure of nuclei and on the theory of nuclear reactions.
Albert Edward Caswell (1884–1954), was head of the department of physics at the University of Oregon from 1934 to 1949, a professor emeritus, and Fellow of the American Physical Society.
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