Arthur Jeffrey Dempster

Arthur Jeffrey Dempster (August 14, 1886 – March 11, 1950) was a Canadian-American physicist best known for his work in mass spectrometry and his discovery in 1935 of the uranium isotope ²³⁵U.^[1]

Early life and education

Dempster was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Toronto in 1909 and 1910, respectively. He travelled to study in Germany, and then left at the outset of World War I for the United States; there he received his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago.

Academic career

Dempster joined the physics faculty at the University of Chicago in 1916 and remained there until his death in 1950.

During World War II he worked on the secret Manhattan Project to develop the world's first nuclear weapons.

Dempster was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1932 and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1937.^[2][3]

From 1943 to 1946, Dempster was chief physicist of the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory or "Met Lab" which integrally related to the Manhattan Project and founded to study the materials necessary for the manufacture of atomic bombs.

In 1946, he took a position as a division director at the Argonne National Laboratory.

Dempster died on March 11, 1950, in Stuart, Florida, at the age of 63.

Research

In 1918, Dempster developed the first modern

References