Emilio Gino Segr
Segrè, Emilio Gino (1905-1989) was an Italian-born American physicist. He won the 1959 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in demonstrating the existence of the antiproton, a negatively charged subatomic particle.
The antiproton has the same mass as the proton, which is positively charged. Segrè shared the prize with his research partner, the American physicist Owen Chamberlain. They announced their discovery of the antiproton in 1955.
Segrè was born on Feb. 1, 1905, in Tivoli, Italy. He studied at the University of Rome under the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and received a Ph.D. degree in physics in 1928. After one year of mandatory military service, Segrè returned to the university, where he taught from 1930 to 1936.
From 1936 to 1938, Segrè was a researcher at the University of Palermo. With his associate Carlo Perrier, he isolated and named technetium, the first artificially created element, in 1937.
Segrè began living in the United States in 1938 and was a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley from 1938 to 1943. In 1940, he was part of a team of scientists that discovered the element astatine and created the isotope plutonium 239, which is used in nuclear weapons.
From 1943 to 1946, during World War II (1939-1945), Segrè supervised a research group working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. Segrè became a U.S. citizen in 1944. In 1946, he returned to Berkeley, where he was a professor of physics until his retirement in 1972.
From 1974 to 1975, Segrè was a professor of physics at the University of Rome. He died of a heart attack on April 22, 1989, in Lafayette, California.