Abstract
ON the joint recommendation of the presidents of the Royal Society and the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Council of the Institution of Civil Engineers has awarded the James Alfred Ewing Medal for 1947 to Sir John Cockcroft, for specially meritorious contributions to the science of engineering in the field of research. The medal is awarded annually and was founded in 1936 in memory of Sir Alfred Ewing. Sir John Cockcroft succeeded Sir Edward Applet on in May 1939 as Jacksonian professor of natural philosophy in the University of Cambridge. During the War he became director of the Air Defence Research and Experimental Establishment of the Ministry of Supply and a member of the Ministry‘s Advisory Council on Scientific Besearch and Technical Development. Later he became director of the Montreal Laboratory of the National Research Council of Canada, and of the Canadian Experimental Atomic Research Plant until early in 1946, when he was appointed director of the Atomic Energy Research and Development Establishment, Harwell, Didcot, formed under the Ministry of Supply to deal with all aspects of the use of atomic energy. He has published various papers on nuclear physics and also on technical subjects. In 1936 he delivered the thirty-seventh Kelvin Lecture before the Institution of Electrical Engineers, taking as his subject "The Transmutation of Matter by High-Energy Particles and Radiators". In 1946 he received the Hopkins Prize from the Cambridge Philosophical Society for researches carried out during the period 1933-39 on the artificial transmutation of elements. Sir John Cockcroft has been concerned with most of the major achievements of the Cavendish Laboratory during the past sixteen years, his advice having been sought on the design of much of its special equipment; he took a leading part in the construction of the cyclotron at Cambridge.
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Institution of Civil Engineers: James Alfred Ewing Medal. Nature 161, 592 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161592b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161592b0