Edwin McMillan
American scientist
Died when: 83 years 354 days (1007 months)Star Sign: Virgo
Edwin Mattison McMillan (September 18, 1907 – September 7, 1991) was an American physicist credited with being the first-ever to produce a transuranium element, neptunium.
For this, he shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Glenn Seaborg.A graduate of California Institute of Technology, he earned his doctorate from Princeton University in 1933, and joined the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, where he discovered oxygen-15 and beryllium-10.
During World War II, he first worked on microwave radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, and on sonar at the Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory.
In 1942 he joined the Manhattan Project, the wartime effort to create atomic bombs, and he helped establish the project's Los Alamos Laboratory where the bombs were designed.
He led teams working on the gun-type nuclear weapon design, and also participated in the development of the successful implosion-type nuclear weapon.
McMillan co-invented the synchrotron with Vladimir Veksler, and after the war he returned to the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory to build them.
He was appointed associate director of the Radiation Laboratory in 1954, and promoted to deputy director in 1958.He became director on the death of lab founder Ernest Lawrence later that year, and he stayed in that position until his retirement in 1973.
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