William E. Drummond
William Eckel Drummond was born on 18 September 1927 in Portland, Oregon, to James Edger and Blanche Black Drummond. He died 14 December 2016. Bill attended Grant High School in Portland, where he was an outstanding tennis player, winning a number of championships and ranking nationally in both singles and doubles play.
Following high school, Bill enrolled at Stanford University, majoring in physics. He graduated in 1950 and enlisted in the US Navy.
In 1953, he married Stephanie Jones of Victoria, Canada, whom he met while visiting friends in New York. They had three children.
After his discharge from the Navy, Bill continued his college education, obtaining his PhD in physics in 1958 from Stanford under the direction of Leonard I. Schiff. His brother, James E. Drummond, Jr., also a plasma physicist, had graduated there two years earlier. Upon graduation, Bill joined and eventually became director of the Plasma Turbulence Laboratory at General Atomic, a division of General Dynamics. While there, he met and worked with Marshall Rosenbluth and David Pines. His 1961 paper on the quasilinear theory of weak plasma turbulence with Pines is among the most highly cited papers in the field of plasma physics.
In the early 1960s, Harold P. Hanson, chair of the University of Texas physics department in Austin, approached Bill about establishing a plasma physics research center at UT Austin. By 1964, Bill and his family had moved to Austin. He convinced the Texas Atomic Energy Research Foundation to provide the funding to conduct a collisionless shock experiment directed by A. E. Robson from Culham Laboratory. Bill’s leadership was responsible for the UT administration supporting his vision of a world-class plasma program and providing the academic positions that enabled him to recruit bright young plasma physicists to work with him and other UT researchers. His efforts ultimately resulted in two of the premier fusion and plasma physics centers in the nation: the Fusion Research Center and the Institute for Fusion Studies. He recruited Marshall Rosenbluth to be the first director of the Institute. The Fusion Research Center built the Texas Tokamak, an experiment in which plasma physicists from other labs throughout the world joined UT researchers investigating fundamental properties of plasmas, plasma edge effects, plasma transport, and developing basic plasma diagnostics.
In addition to his professorial responsibilities, Bill also established a plasma physics related research company, Austin Research Associates. He hired a number of very bright young physicists and programmers. They were early investigators of the use of large amplitude plasma waves in e-beams to accelerate ions to high energies with tabletop devices.
Bill loved sailing. He was a trustee of the Austin Yacht Club and among those responsible for the current club site.
Throughout his career, Bill was recognized as one of the nation’s premier theoretical plasma physicists and a leading authority in the field of non-linear plasma dynamics, plasma turbulence and plasma radiation. He was a US delegate to the first International Conference on Plasma Physics and Controlled Thermonuclear Fusion in Salzburg in 1961 and the Second International Conference at Culham, England, in 1965. He was a member of the first international faculty of the Seminar on Plasma Physics at the International Institute for Theoretical Physics in Trieste in 1964 and a member of the plasma physics panel of the National Academy of Sciences.
