
Donald Cooksey (May 15, 1892 – August 19, 1977), was an American physicist who was associate director of the
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory
Lawrence may refer to:
Education Colleges and universities
* Lawrence Technological University, a university in Southfield, Michigan, United States
* Lawrence University, a liberal arts university in Appleton, Wisconsin, United States
Preparato ...
of the
University of California at Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...
.
Cooksey was the son of George Cooksey from Birmingham, England and Linda Dows from New York. After High School at the Thacher School in California, Donald Cooksey followed his brother Charlton Cooksey (a physics professor at Yale) and attended Yale and where he too became a physicist specializing in designing and building scientific instruments, especially detectors for measuring sub-atomic particles such as
neutron
The neutron is a subatomic particle, symbol or , which has a neutral (not positive or negative) charge, and a mass slightly greater than that of a proton. Protons and neutrons constitute the nuclei of atoms. Since protons and neutrons behav ...
s. When
Ernest O. Lawrence
Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was an American nuclear physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron. He is known for his work on uranium-isotope separation fo ...
was at Yale during the 1920s, Cooksey and Lawrence became friends. In 1932, after Lawrence had moved to Berkeley, California to set up the Radiation Laboratory there, Lawrence asked Cooksey to come to Berkeley to make detectors for use with Lawrence's
cyclotron
A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented by Ernest O. Lawrence in 1929–1930 at the University of California, Berkeley, and patented in 1932. Lawrence, Ernest O. ''Method and apparatus for the acceleration of ions'', filed: J ...
s. Cooksey continued to be a close associate of Lawrence and became associate director of the
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory
Lawrence may refer to:
Education Colleges and universities
* Lawrence Technological University, a university in Southfield, Michigan, United States
* Lawrence University, a liberal arts university in Appleton, Wisconsin, United States
Preparato ...
of the
University of California at Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...
.
Donald Cooksey and his wife Milicent Sperry had a son Donald Dows Cooksey (born in 1944) and a daughter Helen Sperry Cooksey (born 1947) who became a surgeon.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cooksey, Donald
1892 births
1977 deaths
20th-century American physicists
Manhattan Project people
American scientific instrument makers
The Thacher School alumni
Yale University alumni
Fellows of the American Physical Society