Dr. Hamilton is a Landon C. Garland Distinguished Professor of Physics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.
NASHVILLE, TN, December 12, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Joseph Hants Hamilton, PhD, with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Dr. Hamilton celebrates many years' experience in his professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Dr. Hamilton is a Landon C. Garland Distinguished Professor of Physics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. He is a career physicist who was first hired as a member of the faculty in 1958. He is the longest-tenured professor at the university with more than 50 years of service. He has taught physics at every level, from basic courses for non-science majors to supervising the complex work of graduate students. He has also directed the PhD theses of more than 60 graduate students, 30 MS students theses, 12 undergraduate senior honor's theses and postdoctoral trainings of more than 100 PhD graduates and taught physics to over 10,000 undergraduate students. For all these things, he received the American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics Mentoring Award in 2016. In 2008, Dr. Hamilton was honored at a symposium marking his 50th year at the university and for his contributions to international cooperation, education, and research, with scientists in attendance from around the world.
Dr. Hamilton has been recognized as one of the world's most brilliant nuclear physicists, and he was a co-discoverer of three new elements 115, 117 (where he played a lead role and proposed its name of tennessine), and 118, which provided confirmation of longstanding theoretical predictions of a long-lived Island of Stability around N = 184, Z = 114-120 and can be valuable as potential new sources of energy and for other future scientific applications. He has published more than 1,100 papers and articles on nuclear physics, as well as articles on general scientific topics. He has organized and chaired 13 international research conferences in nuclear physics. He is the author/co-author of 23 books including 19 research books, an undergraduate physics textbook, and "How Things Work," a book for middle and high school students released by National Geographic. He has also served on the editorial board for several publications, including Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics, the McGraw-Hill Yearbook in Science and Technology, and the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, and he has served as associate editor for the International Journal of Modern Physics.
Throughout the course of Dr. Hamilton's tenure in higher education, he has delivered more than 500 lectures and has been featured at universities and conferences across 49 countries. He has served as a visiting and adjunct professor at universities in Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, China, Russia, and France. He has given lectures at K-12 schools for those students interested in pursuing further education in science. From 1991-2004 he founded and directed the Vanderbilt Summer Science Program which brought 224 high school students and 112 teachers for a three-week program doing experiments in a variety of different laboratories at Vanderbilt and ORNL to interest them in scientific careers. In addition to his academic work, he was responsible for the establishment of major nuclear research facilities in Tennessee, and spearheaded that state's emergence as a world center for research in nuclear physics. In 1971 he founded the University Isotope Separator at Oak Ridge, UNISOR, a consortium of 10 universities, to build a new facility and carry out research on exotic nuclei for over 40 years. In 1981, with major support from the State of Tennessee, Vanderbilt and ORNL he founded and directed the Joint Institute for Heavy Ion Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This first university institute at a national laboratory is credited with transforming ORNL by opening the door for major State of Tennessee support for three new large institutes that bring in over $200M/year and thousands of scientists and students to ORNL.
Dr. Hamilton holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Physics from Mississippi College, Master of Science in Physics from Indiana University, and a PhD in Physics from Indiana University. He has received eight honorary doctorate degrees, including from St. Petersburg State University, Russia, the Ravi Shankar Shukla University in India, the University of Bucharest in Romania, and the Johann Goethe University, Frankfurt in Germany. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society where he served on the council from 2000-2004 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the Academia Europaea, the American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Institute of Physics where he served on the governing board from 2004 to 2007, and Sigma Xi, where he served as chapter president in 1970.
Dr. Hamilton was the recipient of a 1975 Beams Award for Outstanding Research; 1988 Pegram Award for Outstanding Teaching; and 2000 Slack Award for Outstanding Service all given by Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society which he served as chair 1973-1974 and its representative to the American Physical Society Council 1993-2004; 1979 Senior Alexander von Humboldt Prize, Federal Republic of Germany; 1996 American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for International Cooperation; 2002 International Science and Technology Cooperation Award by the Peoples Republic of China, a 2002 D. Ilkovic Gold Medal by the Slovak Academy of Science, and a 2003 Flerov Prize for Research by Russia. He has also received numerous teaching awards, including a 1983-1984 Harvie Branscomb Distinguished Professor Award by Vanderbilt University, a 1990 Guy and Rebecca Forman Award for Outstanding Physics Teaching, and a Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1996; and in 1991 the Council for Advancement and Support of Education named him the Outstanding Professor of the Year for the State of Tennessee, one of the four finalists for National Professor of the Year. He was a National Science Foundation grantee from 1959 until 1976 and has an ongoing grant by the ERDA-Department of Energy that was initiated in 1975.
Dr. Hamilton has been included in multiple editions of Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in American Education, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and Who's Who in the South and Southwest over the course of the last 30 years. Dr. Hamilton has been married to Jannelle Jauree Landrum since 1960 and has two adult children, and three grandchildren.
In recognition of outstanding contributions to his profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Joseph Hants Hamilton, PhD, has been featured on the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
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