Willis Lamb

Education and career

Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. was born on July 12, 1913 in Los Angeles, California, the son of Willis Eugene Lamb Sr., a telephone engineer, and Marie Helen Metcalf. First admitted in 1930, he obtained a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1934. For theoretical work on scattering of neutrons by a crystal, guided by J. Robert Oppenheimer, Lamb received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1938. Because of limited computational methods available at the time, this research narrowly missed revealing the Mössbauer Effect, 19 years before its recognition by Rudolf Mössbauer. He worked on nuclear theory, laser physics, and verifying quantum mechanics.

In 1938, Lamb became Instructor in Physics at Columbia University, where he was promoted to Professor of Physics in 1948. In 1951, he was appointed Professor of Physics at Stanford University. From 1956 to 1962, he was Wykeham Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, where he was also a Fellow of New College. In 1962, he was appointed Henry Ford II Professor of Physics at Yale University. In 1974, he became Professor of Physics and Optical Science at the University of Arizona, where he remained until his retirement in 2003.