Marshall N. Rosenbluth Papers, 1960-2003 (MSS 670)

Born in Albany, New York, on February 5, 1927, Marshall N. Rosenbluth graduated from high school in 1942 and after two years in the U.S. Navy, graduated from Harvard with his bachelor's degree in 1946. He went on in 1949 to receive his Ph.D. with a focus on high energy particle physics from the University of Chicago.

After his post-doctoral position at Stanford University (1949-1950) where he derived the Rosenbluth formula, he joined the Los Alamos Laboratory and worked on the hydrogen bomb and other projects from 1950-1956. Rosenbluth's time at Los Alamo began his life-long pursuit of fusion as an alternate energy source.

In 1956 Rosenbluth took the position of senior research advisor with the nuclear energy research company General Atomics (GA) in San Diego. He continued working with GA even after being appointed professor of physics at University of California, San Diego in 1960. After 1967, Rosenbluth took professorships at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study and then at the University of Texas at Austin before returning to UCSD and GA twenty years later in 1987. Rosenbluth retired from these positions in 1993 and began work as the chief scientist of the Central Team for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) until 1999. During this time, he was also involved with the JASON Defense Advisory Group, an independent group of scientists that advised the United States government on military, science, and energy-related issues.

During his career Rosenbluth received many awards and recognitions including the E.O. Lawrence Prize, awarded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1964; the James Clerk Maxwell Prize in Plasma Physics, awarded by the American Physical Society in 1976; the National Medal of Science, awarded by President Clinton in 1997; and the Nicholson Medal from the American Physical Society in 2000.

Rosenbluth died in 2003.