George B. Pegram, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetGeorge B. Pegram
American physicist
Date of Birth: 24-Oct-1876
Place of Birth: Trinity, North Carolina, United States
Date of Death: 12-Aug-1958
Profession: physicist
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Scorpio 
About George B. Pegram
- George Braxton Pegram (October 24, 1876 – August 12, 1958) was an American physicist who played a key role in the technical administration of the Manhattan Project.
- He graduated from Trinity College (now Duke University) in 1895, and taught high school before becoming a teaching assistant in physics at Columbia University in 1900.
- He was to spend the rest of his working life at Columbia, taking his doctorate there in 1903 and becoming a full professor in 1918.
- His administrative career began as early as 1913 when he became the department's executive officer.
- By 1918, he was Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences but he resigned in 1930 to relaunch his research activities, performing many meticulous measurements on the properties of neutrons with John R.
- Dunning.
- He was also chairman of Columbia's physics department from 1913 to 1945. Returning to administration as Dean in 1936, Pegram met Enrico Fermi on his arrival in the United States.
- In 1940 he brokered a meeting between Fermi and the US Navy at which the prospect of an atomic bomb was raised with the military for the first time.
- Following Marcus Oliphant's mission to the United States in August 1941 to alert the Americans to its feasibility, Pegram and his colleague Harold C.
- Urey led a diplomatic mission to the United Kingdom to establish co-operation on development of the atomic bomb.
- They soon found themselves on Vannevar Bush's S-1 Section coordinating technical research.
- Columbia's physics department was home to the SAM Laboratories, where many of the key technologies required for the bomb were developed. After the war Pegram helped found the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
- He served as vice president of the university 1949 to 1950.
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