Robert Brode
Robert Brode | |
|---|---|
Brode's ID badge photo from Los Alamos | |
| Born | June 12, 1900 Walla Walla, Washington, U.S. |
| Died | February 19, 1986 (aged 85) Berkeley, California, U.S. |
| Education | Whitman College (BS) California Institute of Technology (MS, PhD) Oriel College, Oxford |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | Los Alamos Laboratory University of California, Berkeley |
| Thesis | The Absorption Coefficient for Slow Electrons in Gases (1924) |
| Signature | |
Robert Bigham Brode (June 12, 1900 – February 19, 1986) was an American physicist, who during World War II led the group at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory that developed the fuses used in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A graduate of the California Institute of Technology, where he earned his doctorate in 1924, Brode attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship and the University of Göttingen on a National Research Council Fellowship. During World War II, Brode worked at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where he helped develop the proximity fuze and then as a group leader at the Los Alamos Laboratory. In 1950 he was one of a dozen prominent scientists who petitioned President Harry S. Truman to declare that the United States would never be the first to use the hydrogen bomb.
After the war, Brode returned to teaching at Berkeley. Between 1930 and 1957 he supervised 37 graduate students. In addition to his research and teaching, he occupied a number of other positions. He was the academic assistant to two presidents of the University of California, and sat on numerous advisory panels and boards.