Marcelo Damy de Souza Santos

Marcelo Damy de Sousa Santos (July 14, 1914 – November 29, 2009) was a Brazilian physicist.

Considered as one of the most important educators and researchers in physics in Brazil, along with Cesar Lattes, José Leite Lopes and Mario Schenberg, Damy was born in Campinas, São Paulo, in 1914, the son of Harald Egydio de Souza Santos a photographer, and Maria Luiza Damy de Souza Santos. He did his secondary studies in the State Gymnasium (later to be called Colégio Culto à Ciência) and was a keen student of sciences, particularly physics and chemistry.

In 1933, he was admitted to the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo to study electrical engineering, but eventually switched to physics at the invitation of Prof. Gleb Wataghin, a Russian physicist who was teaching at the time in the university, whose classes Damy enjoyed to listen, although they were given in a different course from his. He graduated in the first class of the course of physics at USP.

During his undergraduate years, Damy became interested in radioactivity. This interest started his successful lifelong career in experimental nuclear physics. After graduation, he went to Cambridge University, at 24, with a grant from the British Council, under the supervision of Prof. William L. Bragg (Nobel Prize in Physics). In England he became friends with Edmundo Barbosa da Silva, Oxford University student and future colleague in the Atomic Energy Commission of the Brazilian National Research Council. Back in Brazil, Damy worked as a research scientist for the Brazilian Navy, especially in the development of a sonar, working in a laboratory on the premises of the department of physics at the USP Faculty of Philosophy, Science and Letters until the end of World War II (1945). For this important work he received the Brazilian Medal of Naval Merit.

...
Wikipedia