Edwin Mattison McMillan

Edwin Mattison McMillan (1907-1991), American physicist and Nobel laureate, known for his work with the transuranium elements. He was born in Redondo Beach, California, and educated at the California Institute of Technology and Princeton University. Associated with the University of California at Berkeley after 1932, he became full professor of physics in 1946. After 1934 McMillan was also associated with the university’s radiation laboratory; in 1958 he became its director.

McMillan was codiscoverer (1940) of the first transuranium element, neptunium. Further research, conducted in collaboration with the American chemist Glenn Theodore Seaborg, led to the discovery, also in 1940, of plutonium. In addition, McMillan is noted for his work in sonar and radar and for the design and construction of particle accelerators. For their discoveries in the chemistry of transuranium elements, he and Seaborg shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in chemistry. McMillan shared the Atoms for Peace Award in 1963 with Soviet physicist Vladimir Iosovitch Veksler, and in 1990, was the recipient of the National Medal of Science.