James Franck (1882-1964)

Awarded the Prize “for his discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom.”

American physicist. Franck was born in Hamburg on August 26, 1882. He was educated at Heidelberg Berlin where he obtained his doctorate in 1906. He became Head of the Physics Division in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in 1918. In 1920 he was appointed as the Chair of Experimental Physics at Gottingen. He went to America in 1935, where he served as a professor at Johns Hopkins University the University of Chicago, where he served as Director of the Chemistry Division of the Metallurgical Laboratory. Franck died in Gottingen on May 21, 1964.