APS Member History

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1	Name:	Dr. John Cocke
	Institution:	IBM
	Year Elected:	1995
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	103. Engineering
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1925
	Death Date:	July 16, 2002

2	Name:	Dr. Mildred S. Dresselhaus
	Institution:	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
	Year Elected:	1995
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	103. Engineering
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1930
	Death Date:	February 20, 2017

	Mildred Dresselhaus was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in a poor section of the Bronx. She attended the New York City public schools through junior high school. She then went to Hunter College High School in New York City and continued her education at Hunter College. She was a Fulbright Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University from 1951-52. Next, she earned her master's degree at Radcliffe in 1953 and continued on to get a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1958. Her thesis was on "The Microwave Surface Impedance of a Superconductor in a Magnetic Field." At the University of Chicago she came into contact with Enrico Fermi, one of the great physicists of the 20th century. The "survival" tactics that helped propel her to success were honed in her earliest years; raised in poverty, she learned as a child to protect herself against daily intimidation in a tough New York neighborhood. Dr. Dresselhaus started college planning to go into elementary school teaching. When she was a sophomore at Hunter College, she met Rosalyn Yalow, who taught her physics and later became a Nobel Laureate in medicine (1977). It was in part due to her interactions with Rosalyn Yalow that Dr. Dresselhaus recognized her potential as a physicist and developed higher goals for herself. Also coming from a disadvantaged background, Yalow encouraged the young undergraduate to press ahead despite detractors, taught her to recognize and seize opportunity, and followed her career as it unfolded with "advice and love". Mildred Dresselhaus moved to Cornell University to complete her NSF sponsored Post-Doctoral fellowship where she continued her studies on superconductivity. After her post-doctorate days were over, she and her husband moved to the Boston area where they both got jobs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts. Both worked at Lincoln Labs for the next 7 years. At the Lincoln Laboratory, she switched from research on superconductivity to magneto-optics and carried out a series of experiments that led to a fundamental understanding of the electronic structure of semimetals, especially graphite. With four young children, she was invited in 1967 by Louis Smullin, head of the Electrical Engineering Department, to come to MIT and be a visiting professor for a year. She was so enthusiastic about teaching undergraduates and graduate students, and about working with graduate students on research projects, that she was in 1968 appointed as a tenured full professor. She remained on the MIT faculty throughout her career, pursuing an intense research and teaching career in the area of electronic materials. A leader in promoting opportunities for women in science and engineering, Dr. Dresselhaus received a Carnegie Foundation grant in 1973 to encourage women's study of traditionally male dominated fields, such as physics. In 1973, she was appointed to The Abby Rockefeller Mauze chair, an Institute-wide chair, endowed in support of the scholarship of women in science and engineering. She greatly enjoyed her career in science. As Dr. Dresselhaus says about working with MIT students, "I like to be challenged. I welcome the hard questions and having to come up with good explanations on the spot. That's an experience I really enjoy." She has over her career graduated over 60 Ph.D. students and has given many invited lectures worldwide on her research work. Her later research interests were on little tiny things, which go under the name of nanostructures, carbon nanotubes, bismuth nanowires and low dimensional thermoelectricity. Awards received include the Karl T. Compton Medal for Leadership in Physics from the American Institute of Physics (2001); the Medal of Achievement in Carbon Science and Technology from the American Carbon Society (2001); honorary membership in the Ioffe Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2000); the National Materials Advancement Award of the Federation of Materials Societies (2000); 19 honorary doctorate degrees; the Nicholson Medal of the American Physical Society (2000); the Weizmann Institute's Millennial Lifetime Achievement Award (2000); UNESCO's Award for Women in Science (2007); the University of Chicago's Alumni Medal (2008); the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award (2012); the Kavli Prize from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (2012), the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the IEEE Medal of Honor (2015). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1995. Mildred Dresselhaus died February 20, 2017, in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the age of 86.

3	Name:	Dr. Val L. Fitch
	Institution:	Princeton University
	Year Elected:	1995
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	106. Physics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1923
	Death Date:	February 5, 2015

	Val L. Fitch was born the youngest of three children on a cattle ranch in Cherry County, Nebraska, not far from the South Dakota border: a very sparsely populated part of the United States and remote from any center of population. His family later moved to Gordon, Nebraska, a town about 25 miles away, where all of his formal schooling took place. The most significant occurrence in his education, however, came when, as a soldier in the U.S. Army in WWII, he was sent to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to work on the Manhattan Project. Under the direction of Ernest Titterton, a member of the British Mission, he was engaged in highly stimulating work while, even as a technician garbed in a military fatigue uniform, he had the opportunity to meet and see at work many of the great figures in physics: Fermi, Bohr, Chadwick, Rabi, Tolman, etc. Dr. Fitch recorded some of the experiences from those days in a chapter in All in Our Time, a book edited by Jane Wilson and published by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. All told, he spent three years at Los Alamos and in that period learned well the techniques of experimental physics. He observed that the most accomplished experimentalists were also the ones who knew the most about electronics, so electronic techniques were the first he learned. But mainly he learned, in approaching the measurement of new phenomena, not just to consider using existing apparatus but to allow the mind to wander freely and invent new ways of doing the job. Robert Bacher, the leader of the physics division in which he worked, offered Dr. Fitch a graduate assistantship at Cornell after the war, but he still had to finish the work for an undergraduate degree, which he did at McGill University. Another opportunity for graduate work soon came from Columbia, and he ended up there working with for his Ph.D. thesis. One day in his office, which he shared at the time with Aage Bohr, Rainwater handed him a preprint of a paper by John Wheeler devoted to µ-mesic atoms. This paper emphasized, in the case of the heavier nuclei, the extreme sensitivity of the Is level to the size of the nucleus. Even though the radiation from these atoms had never been observed, these atomic systems might be a good thesis topic. At this same time a convergence of technical developments took place. The Columbia Nevis cyclotron was just coming into operation. The beams of (pi)-measons from the cyclotron contained an admixture of µ-measons which came from the decay of the (pi)'s and which could be separated by range. Sodium iodide with thallium activation had just been shown by Hofstadter to be an excellent scintillation counter and energy spectrometer for gamma rays. And there were new phototubes just being produced by RCA which were suitable matches to sodium iodide crystals to convert the scintillations to electrical signals. The other essential ingredient to make a gamma-ray spectrometer was a multichannel pulse height analyzer which, utilizing his Los Alamos experience, Dr. Fitch designed and built with the aid of a technician. The net result of all the effort for his thesis was the pioneering work on µ-mesic atoms. It is of interest to note that the group came very close to missing the observation of the gamma-rays completely. Wheeler had calculated the 2p-1s transition energy in Pb, using the then accepted nuclear radius 1.4 A1/3 fermi, to be around 4.5 MeV. Correspondingly, they had set the spectrometer to look in that energy region. After several frustrating days, Rainwater suggested broadening the range and then the peak appeared - not at 4.5 MeV but at 6 MeV! The nucleus was substantially smaller than had been deduced from other effects. Shortly afterwards Hofstadter got the same results from his electron scattering experiments. While the µ-mesic atom measurements give the rms radius of the nucleus with extreme accuracy the electron scattering results have the advantage of yielding many moments to the charge distribution. Now the best information is obtained by combining the results from both µ-mesic atoms and electron scattering. Subsequently, in making precise gamma-ray measurements to obtain a better mass value for the µ-meson, it was found that substantial corrections for the vacuum polarization were required to get agreement with independent mass determinations. While the vacuum polarization is about 2% of the Lamb shift in hydrogen it is the very dominant electrodynamic correction in µ-mesic atoms. Dr. Fitch's interest then shifted to the strange particles and K mesons, but he had learned from his work at Columbia the delights of unexpected results and the challenge they present in understanding nature. Dr. Fitch took a position at Princeton where, most often working with a few graduate students, he spent the next 20 years studying K-mesons. The ultimate in unexpected results was that which was recognized by the Nobel Foundation in 1980, the discovery of CP-violation. At any one time there is a natural tendency among physicists to believe that we already know the essential ingredients of a comprehensive theory. But each time a new frontier of observation is broached we inevitably discover new phenomena which force us to modify substantially our previous conceptions. Dr. Fitch believed this process to be unending, that the delights and challenges of unexpected discovery will continue always. In 1967 he and Jim Cronin received the Research Corporation award for work on CP violation and in 1976 the John Price Witherill medal of the Franklin Institute. He received the E. O. Lawrence award in 1968. Dr. Fitch was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1995. He served as chairman of the Physics Department at Princeton University and was James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics Emeritus at the time of his death February 5, 2015, at age 91.

4	Name:	Dr. Samuel Karlin
	Institution:	Stanford University
	Year Elected:	1995
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	104. Mathematics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1924
	Death Date:	December 18, 2007

5	Name:	Dr. Frank Sherwood Rowland
	Institution:	University of California, Irvine
	Year Elected:	1995
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1927
	Death Date:	March 10, 2012

	Frank Sherwood Rowland was a Nobel laureate and Donald Bren Research Professor of Chemistry and Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. His research in atmospheric chemistry and chemical kinetics has had an enormous impact on scientific, industrial and general activity on a global scale. Born in Ohio, Dr. Rowland received his B.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University (1948), then earned his M.S. in 1951 and his Ph.D. in 1952, both from the University of Chicago. He held academic posts at Princeton University (1952-56) and at the University of Kansas (1956-64) before becoming a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, in 1964. At Irvine in the early 1970s he began working with Mario Molina, with whom he would discover the effects of chlorofluorocarbon gases on the ozone layer of the stratosphere. The pair were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery. Dr. Rowland has won numerous other awards for his work, including the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (1983), the Japan Prize (1989), the Peter Debye Award (1993) and the Roger Revelle Medal (1994). He was elected to the membership of the National Academy of Sciences in 1978, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977, and the Royal Society (as a foreign member) in 2004. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1995. Dr. Rowland died on March 10, 2012, at home in Corona del Mar, California, at the age of 84.

6	Name:	Dr. Vera C. Rubin
	Institution:	Carnegie Institution of Washington
	Year Elected:	1995
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	101. Astronomy
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1928
	Death Date:	December 25, 2016

	Vera C. Rubin was an observational astronomer who studied the motions of gas and stars in galaxies and motions of galaxies in the universe. Her work was influential in discovering that most of the matter in the universe is dark. She was a graduate of Vassar College, Cornell University, and Georgetown University; George Gamow was her thesis professor. She was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. President Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Science (1993). She received the Weizmann Women and Science Award, the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the Gruber International Cosmology Prize, the Watson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (London); the previous award to a woman was to Caroline Herschel in 1828. She was active in encouraging and supporting women in science. Her husband and their four children were all Ph.D. scientists. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1995. Vera Rubin died December 25, 2016, at age 88.

7	Name:	Dr. Allan Rex Sandage
	Institution:	Observatories of Carnegie Institution of Washington
	Year Elected:	1995
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	101. Astronomy
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1926
	Death Date:	November 13, 2010

	Astronomer Allan Sandage combined his impressive astronomical knowledge with outstanding scientific judgment and an extraordinary ability to discern new concepts that were ripe for development. Based at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington from 1956 until his death, he was best known for his extended work establishing the rate of expansion of the universe (the red-shift distance or Hubble relationship). He was also noted for his discovery in the M-82 galaxy of jets erupting from the core, and for having conducted important spectral studies of globular clusters. Dr. Sandage received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1953, and he had also served as Homewood Professor of Physics at Johns Hopkins University and as a senior research scientist at NASA's Space Telescope Scientific Institute. His many honors include the Warner Prize (1960), the Eddington Medal (1963), the National Medal of Science (1970), the Bruce Medal (1975) and the Crafoord Prize (1991). Allan Sandage died November 13, 2010, at age 84, in San Gabriel, California.

8	Name:	Dr. Gilbert Stork
	Institution:	Columbia University
	Year Elected:	1995
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1921
	Death Date:	October 21, 2017

	Gilbert Stork received a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in 1945. He was an assistant professor at Harvard University until 1953, when he moved to Columbia University for a career spanning four decades. He became Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry Emeritus in 1992, but continued to work up to his death on October 21, 2017, at age 95. Gilbert Stork was a world leader in the art and science of synthetic organic chemistry. Not only had he achieved trail-blazing syntheses of complex natural products of biochemical interest, such as cantharidin, lupeol, prostaglandins, steroids, reserpine and calictriol, but at the same time, he had developed many synthetic methodologies of wide applicability. Of special note is the inspiration and training he provided in his laboratory for students and postdoctoral fellows who went on to important academic and industrial positions worldwide. Dr. Stork received many honors for his work, including the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry (1957), Baekeland Medal (1961), Edward Curtis Franklin Memorial Award from Stanford (1966), American Chemical Society Award in Synthetic Organic Chemistry (1967), Roussel Prize in Steroid Chemistry (1978), Nichols Medal (1980), Arthur C. Cope Award (1980), National Medal of Science (1982), Edgar Fahs Smith Award (1982), Willard Gibbs Medal (1982), Linus Pauling Award (1983), Roger Adams Award in Organic Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (1991), the Welch Prize in Chemistry (1993), the Wolf Prize (1996), the Philadelphia Organic Chemists' Club Award (1998), the First Barton gold medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2002), the Ryoji Noyori Prize (2004) and the Herbert Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods (2005). He wss an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Académie des Sciences (France), the Royal Society of Chemistry, (U.K.), and the Royal Society (U.K.). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1995.