Lawrence Olin Brockway | |
---|---|
Born |
Topeka, Kansas |
September 23, 1907
Died | November 17, 1979 | (aged 72)
Nationality | American |
Fields | Physical chemistry |
Institutions | University of Michigan |
Doctoral advisor | Linus Pauling |
Doctoral students | Lawrence Bartell, Isabella Karle, Jerome Karle |
Lawrence Olin Brockway (1907-1979) was a physical chemist who spent most of his career at the University of Michigan, where he developed early methods for electron diffraction.
Brockway was born on September 23, 1907, in Topeka, Kansas. He attended the University of Nebraska and received his B.S. in 1929 and his M.S. a year later. He then moved to the California Institute of Technology, where he was one of the first graduate students of Linus Pauling. He and Pauling were interested in the physics of interatomic interactions and focused their efforts on the structure of chalcopyrite, which established Brockway's interest in electron diffraction as a method for studying molecular structure. Brockway received his Ph.D. in 1933. He spent the next several years as a research fellow at Caltech and then received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1937 to spend the following year at the University of Oxford and and Royal Institution.
After returning to the United States in 1938, Brockway joined the faculty at the University of Michigan, where he reached the rank of full professor in 1945 and remained until he assumed professor emeritus status at the end of 1976. During his career at Michigan he was noted as a committed educator and continued teaching specialized seminars after his retirement. Brockway's research interests focused primarily on continued development of electron diffraction, which he began studying as a graduate student, and broadened later to include surface chemistry and thin films.