J. Robert Oppenheimer

Born in New York City in 1904, Oppenheimer earned a chemistry degree from Harvard in 1925 and a physics doctorate from Göttingen in 1927 under Max Born. He joined Berkeley's physics faculty and became a full professor by 1936, contributing foundational work to quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and astrophysics - including early theories of neutron stars and black holes. Briefed on weapon design in 1941, he was recruited to the Manhattan Project in 1942 and appointed director of Los Alamos Laboratory in 1943, overseeing development of the first nuclear weapons. On July 16, 1945, he watched the Trinity test; weeks later, the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He became director of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1947 and lobbied for international nuclear control, later opposing the hydrogen bomb on ethical grounds. During the Second Red Scare, his past Communist associations and his stances led to a 1954 AEC hearing that revoked his security clearance - a decision finally vacated in 2022, five years after his death in 1967.