Rudolf W. Ladenburg

Rudolf Walter Ladenburg (June 6, 1882, Kiel – April 6, 1952, Princeton, New Jersey) was a German atomic physicist. He emigrated from Germany as early as 1932 and became a Brackett Research Professor at Princeton University. When the wave of German emigration began in 1933, he was the principal coordinator for job placement of exiled physicist in the United States.

Ladenburg was the son of the Jewish chemist Albert Ladenburg, ordinarius professor of chemistry at the University of Kiel (1874–1899) and then at the University of Breslau (1899–1909). He was a non-practicing Jew and an atheist.

From 1900 to 1906, Ladenburg studied at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, the Universität Breslau, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He received his doctorate under Wilhelm Röntgen at Munich.

After completion of his Habilitation, Ladenburg became a Privatdozent at Breslau and in 1921 an ausserordentlicher Professor (extraordinarius professor) there. In 1924, he took an appointment at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (today, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) along with becoming a scientific member of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie (KWIPC, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry) of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG, Kaiser Wilhelm Society).

Ladenburg went to the United States as early as 1930, where he became a Brackett Research Professor at the Palmer Physics Laboratory, Princeton University. When the emigration wave from Germany began in April 1933, Ladenburg was the principal coordinator for the employment of exiled physicists in the United States. He retired from Princeton in 1950.

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