Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi (1901 to 1954) was an Italian-born physicist, born in Rome, who became the first physicist to split the atom while studying artificially radioactive isotopes in the 1930s, and whose later research pioneered nuclear power generation. He graduated from the University of Pisa in 1922, lectured at the University of Florence, and became a professor of theoretical physics at Rome, where in 1934 he perfected his theory of beta ray emission. His bombardment of uranium with slow neutrons caused reactions later recognized as atomic fission. Working with Leo Szilard, first at Columbia and then at the University of Chicago, he led the construction of an atomic pile that allowed the controlled release of nuclear energy, achieved in 1942. After time at the Los Alamos laboratory he returned to Chicago in 1945 as a professor at the Institute for Nuclear Studies and became a United States citizen. He received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1938.