Eugene D. Commins
| Eugene Commins | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 1, 1932 |
| Died | September 26, 2015 (aged 83) |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
| Alma mater | Columbia University (Ph.D.) |
| Doctoral advisor | Polykarp Kusch |
| Doctoral students | Hyatt Gibbs Frank Calaprice Stuart Freedman Steven Chu Persis Drell Philip H. Bucksbaum Larry Hunter Dmitry Budker David DeMille B. Chris Regan |
| Notable awards | UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award (1963, 1979) Inducted into the National Academy of Sciences (1987) Berkeley Citation (2001) Oersted Medal (2005) John David Jackson Award for Excellence in Graduate Physics Education (2010) |
Eugene D. Commins (July 1, 1932 – September 26, 2015) was a professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley. He was named a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1987. He was also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Born in New York City, Commins finished his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1958 under Nobel Prize laureate Polykarp Kusch. After serving as a research physicist at the Columbia Radiation Lab, he joined U.C. Berkeley in 1960 as an assistant professor. He became associate professor in 1965 and full professor in 1969. Commins also served as the chair of the department from 1972-1974 and was named professor emeritus in 2005.
Commins and a group of his students were among the first to observe atomic parity violation, a subtle effect of the fundamental weak interactions. These experiments confirmed the Weinberg-Salam-Glashow model of electroweak interaction which is at the core of the Standard Model and for which the three theorists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979.
Besides being a distinguished researcher, Commins was also known for being a great teacher and mentor of future physicists. His most famous student is Steven Chu, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for his discovery of laser cooling and served as U.S. Secretary of Energy during the Obama administration. Another student, Persis Drell, became director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Many of his other students became prominent researchers in the fields ranging from nuclear and particle physics to atomic, molecular, and optical physics at top institutions all around the United States. These students include Hyatt Gibbs, Frank Calaprice, Stuart Freedman,Phillip Bucksbaum, Larry Hunter, Carol Tanner, David DeMille, Dmitry Budker, and B. Chris Regan.
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