Ronald C. Davidson

Davidson was born in Norwich, Ontario, Canada. He received his bachelor's degree from McMaster University in 1963 and his doctorate in physics from Princeton University in 1966. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley from 1966 to 1968. In 1968, he went to teach at the University of Maryland, where he became a full professor in 1972. In 1978, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught until 1991.

Davidson was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the Leadership Award from Fusion Power Associates in 1986 and the 2005 IEEE Particle Accelerator Science and Technology Award. In 2008, he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for "pioneering contributions to the physics of one-component non-neutral plasmas, intense charge particle beams, and collective nonlinear interaction processes in high-temperature plasmas."

Davidson was a resident of Cranbury, New Jersey. He died on May 19, 2016, at his home.