Magdalene College, Cambridge, Names New Prize After Distinguished Alumnus Maurice Goldhaber

Photo of Maurice Goldhaber

Maurice Goldhaber

To mark the significant rise in academic performance in both arts and science subjects at Magdalene College, Cambridge University, England, the College has expanded the number of its "named" prizes with the Maurice Goldhaber Prize for Natural Sciences or Mathematics, in honor of alumnus Maurice Goldhaber, a BNL distinguished scientist emeritus. This prize, which recognizes Goldhaber's eminent academic career in nuclear and particle physics and also commemorates his association with the College as a Ph.D. student and subsequently as the Kingsley Bye Fellow, is awarded to a student offering a distinguished performance in experimental or theoretical physics or mathematics. Tom Pugh, who performed with great distinction in Part III Mathematics in July 2008, won the inaugural prize.

One of the world's most distinguished physicists, Goldhaber, who was born in Austria, earned his Ph.D. in physics at Cambridge University in 1936. Working in 1934 with James Chadwick from the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, he made the first accurate measurement of the mass of the subatomic particle known as the neutron. He thus showed that the neutron was not a compound of a proton and an electron, as was believed at the time, but a new particle.

In 1938, Goldhaber arrived in the U.S. to join the faculty of the University of Illinois. He came to BNL in 1950, where he served as Physics Department Chair from 1960 to 1961, and Laboratory Director from 1961 to 1973. Goldhaber has received numerous awards during the course of his long and extremely productive career, including the Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics in 1971, the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize in 1982, the National Medal of Science in 1983, the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1991, and the Enrico Fermi Award in 1999. He was president of the American Physical Society in 1982, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

2009-1060  |  INT/EXT  |  Newsroom