Donald Cooksey 1943 - NARA 22118086 (cropped)

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 Preparator ...

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 beh ...

s. When Ernest O. Lawrence 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: Jan ...

s. Cooksey continued to be a close associate of Lawrence and became associate director of the

of the

. 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