1967 Seaborg Award: Gerhart Friedlander

Stripped of his citizenship and prohibited from university study because he was Jewish, Friedlander left his native Germany in 1936 and immigrated to the U.S. He received a Ph.D. degree in nuclear chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942.

He worked as an instructor at the University of Idaho for one year before he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he stayed from 1943 to 1946. After a stint at General Electric Research Laboratory, he joined BNL as a chemist in 1948. Friedlander was named a senior chemist in 1952 and served as chair of BNL’s Chemistry Department from 1968 to 1977. He retired in 1981 but remained active in research.

Friedlander led research in high-energy nuclear reactions at BNL’s Cosmotron accelerator. He also helped develop the computerized Monte Carlo calculations of nuclear reaction mechanisms, helping formulate theoretical models that are still used today.

Friedlander coauthored the textbook “Nuclear and Radiochemistry” and was editor-in-chief of Science Spectra.

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