Marshall Nicholas Rosenbluth
Award Name : National Medal of Science
Year of Award : 1997
Award for : Physics
Location : Albany, New York, United States
Marshall Nicholas Rosenbluth was an American plasma physicist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1997 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for discoveries in controlled thermonuclear fusion, contributions to plasma physics, and work in computational statistical mechanics. He was also a recipient of the E.O. Lawrence Prize (1964), the Albert Einstein Award (1967), the James Clerk Maxwell Prize in Plasma Physics (1976), the Enrico Fermi Award (1985), and the Hannes Alfvén Prize (2002). He was born on February 5, 1927 in Albany, New York, United States. Rosenbluth graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1942. He did his undergraduate study at Harvard, graduating in 1946 despite also serving in the U.S. Navy (1944–46) during this period. He received his Ph.D. in 1949 from the University of Chicago. In 1950, Edward Teller, considered the father of the hydrogen bomb, recruited Rosenbluth to work at Los Alamos. Rosenbluth maintained this position until 1956. The research he conducted at Los Alamos led to the development of the H-bomb. He died on September 28, 2003 in San Diego, California, United States.