David Allan Bromley

Born on 4 May 1926 on a farm in northern Canada, David Allan Bromley was a Canadian-American physicist who pioneered modern heavy-ion science and served as science adviser to US president George H. W. Bush. His education began unostentatiously at the age of seven, when he would walk to a one-room schoolhouse four miles away. Bromley proved an adept student, skipping several grades and winning a number of university scholarships, including one for his essay on the evils of alcohol, which allowed him to study at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He earned his BS in engineering in 1948 and went on to the University of Rochester, earning his PhD in 1952. His groundbreaking work in nuclear physics began during a stint from 1955 to 1960 at Canada’s Chalk River Laboratories, where he and his colleagues used the Van de Graaff accelerator to study nuclear deformation in light nuclei. Bromley then continued his research at Yale University, where he founded the A. W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory to house the MP (“Emperor”) accelerator that he designed and built. His career in public service was launched in 1964 when he became chair of the National Research Council’s Committee on Nuclear Science. In 1989 he became the first-ever assistant to the president of the United States for science and technology policy, a cabinet-level post with direct access to President Bush. In honor of a lifetime devoted to education and public service, Bromley was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1988 and the American Physical Society’s Nicholson Medal in 2001. He died at age 78 in 2005. You can read the Physics Today obituary written by Richard Casten and Neal Lane. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection.)

Date in History: 4 May 1926