Richard Garwin

Born on 19 April 1928, Richard Garwin is a gifted physicist and US science policy adviser. Garwin earned his PhD in physics in 1949 at the University of Chicago under Enrico Fermi, who is said to have called Garwin the only true genius he had ever met. Garwin was instrumental in the design of the first hydrogen bomb. After three years on the University of Chicago faculty, in 1952 Garwin joined the IBM Corporation, where he worked for the next four decades as an IBM fellow at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. While there, he performed groundbreaking work in such areas as nuclear magnetic resonance, low-temperature and nuclear physics, and superconducting computers. He has published more than 500 papers and been granted 47 patents. In addition to his achievements in applied research, Garwin has also held professorships at the Columbia, Cornell, and Harvard Universities and worked as a consultant to the US government, advising multiple presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama. Garwin is one of the few scientists to have been elected to all three US National Academies: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine. For his lifetime of service, Garwin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. You can read the transcript of a three-part interview with Garwin from 1986. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 19 April 1928