McMillan, Edwin Mattison
McMillan, Edwin Mattison (1907-1991), a United States nuclear physicist. McMillan and Philip Abelson discovered the first transuranium element, neptunium, in 1940. Later in 1940, McMillan, Glenn T. Seaborg, A. C. Wahl, and J. W. Kennedy discovered plutonium, a second element heavier than uranium. These discoveries were essential to the development of nuclear energy. McMillan and Seaborg received the 1951 Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering transuranium elements.
McMillan was born in Redondo Beach, California. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1928 and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1932. In 1934 he joined the University of California (Berkeley) faculty and the staff of its radiation laboratory. He was director of the laboratory, 1958-73.
During World War II McMillan worked on the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He (and independently, Vladimir I. Veksler, a Russian) discovered the principle used for building the synchrocyclotron, an "atom-smasher" more powerful than the cyclotron, in 1945.