Donald F. Holcomb

Donald Frank Holcomb (November 8, 1925 – August 9, 2018) was an American physicist.

Born in Chesterton, Indiana, on November 8, 1925, Holcomb was raised in primarily in Wood River, Illinois, and graduated from East Alton-Wood River High School in 1943. His university studies were interrupted by military service in the United States Navy. After obtaining a bachelor's degree from DePauw University in 1949, Holcomb pursued graduate study at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, completing a Ph.D in 1954. He began teaching at Cornell University that same year. In 1964, Holcomb became the third director of the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics. [1]In his career, Holcomb spent some time abroad. He received a Sloan Research Fellowship from 1955 to 1957, was named a NATO senior visiting fellow at the University of Oslo in 1962, a Guggenheim fellow in 1968 while at the University of Kent, and a Science Research Council visiting fellow at University of St. Andrews in 1978. He was granted fellowship into the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[2] The American Association of Physics Teachers awarded Holcomb its Oersted Medal in 1996,[3] a year after his retirement from Cornell.[2] He died at home in Ithaca, New York, on August 9, 2018, aged 92.[2]

References

1. Trustees, Cornell University Board of (1965). "Proceedings of the Board of Trustees of Cornell University, 1964/1965": 4934. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
2. Fleischman, Tom (August 16, 2018). "Donald Holcomb, emeritus physics professor, dies at 92". Cornell Chroncle. Retrieved August 26, 2018.
3. Holcomb, Donald F. (1996). "Beyond F=ma, Donald F. Holcomb's acceptance speech for the 1996 Oersted Medal presented by the American Association of Physics Teachers, 16 January 1996". American Journal of Physics. 64 (6): 690–693. Bibcode:1996AmJPh..64..690H. doi:10.1119/1.18233.