Clifford Shull Biography

Clifford Glenwood Shull was a well-known U.S. physicist and Nobel Laureate. As the youngest child of a middle class businessman, he attended school and college commuting from his home in Pittsburg. Later he moved to New York for a research and teaching job at the New York University. Although he wanted to join the Manhattan Project, he had to spend the war years at the Beacon laboratory working on high-performance aviation fuels and lubricants. After the war, he shifted to Clinton Laboratory, which was later renamed as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to work with Ernest Woolen on neutron scattering. Here he developed a technique to probe the molecular structure of materials by bouncing neutrons off them and received his Nobel Prize for it all most half a century later. However, according to his own admission his most satisfying years were spent at Massachusetts Institute of Technology guiding young research students. Here too he continued his work on neutrons and initiated the first neutron diffraction investigations of magnetic materials.