Lee A Dubridge

DuBridge was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on September 21, 1901. In 1918, when he entered Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, he intended to major in chemistry, but his sophomore physics teacher, Dr. Orrin Harold Smith, inspired him to become a physicist. Smith took DuBridge under his wing, hiring him as a teaching assistant in the laboratory and arranging his appointment, following graduation in 1922, as a teaching assistant in physics at the University of Wisconsin. In the fall of 1925, after completing his dissertation research on the photoelectric properties of platinum, DuBridge successfully defended his thesis, mailed it off to the Physical Review for publication, and married his college sweetheart, Doris May Koht. He spent the next nine months at Wisconsin as an instructor in physics. DuBridge spent two years at Caltech (1926-28) as a National Research Council fellow under Robert Millikan’s direction, followed by six years in the Physics Department at Washington University (1928-34), moving up the ranks from assistant to associate professor in 1933. The following year, DuBridge accepted an appointment as professor of physics and chairman of the Physics Department at the University of Rochester, where in 1938 he became dean of the faculty. In 1940, a year after war broke out in Europe, DuBridge took a leave of absence from Rochester, moved his family to Belmont, Massachusetts, and set up shop at M.I.T., where he organized and directed a facility whose official name was the Radiation Laboratory. September 1, 1946, he became president of Caltech. When the National Science Foundation was established in 1950, President Truman appointed him to the National Science Board, its policy-making branch. He continued to build Caltech into one of the finest science institutes in the country, retiring from the presidency in 1969 to become special assistant for science and technology to President Richard Nixon. Lee DuBridge died on January 23, 1993, in Duarte, California.