Victor Weisskopf was an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. Victor Weisskopf was born in Vienna on September 19, 1908. He studied at the University of Vienna and received a doctorate in physics from the University of Gottingen in Germany in 1931. In the 1920s and 1930s, Dr. Weisskopf served at several European research institutions at a time regarded as seminal in the development of nuclear physics. Weisskopf was awarded the Max Planck medal in 1956 and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca in 1972, the National Medal of Science (1980), the Wolf Prize (1981) and the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences (1991). Weisskopf was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was president of the American Physical Society (1960–61) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1976–1979). He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 21, 2002.