Wade Allison | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1941 Britain |
| Education | Universities of Cambridge and Oxford |
| Title | Emeritus Professor |
Wade Allison (born 1941) is a British physicist who is Emeritus professor ofPhysics and Fellow ofKeble College atOxford University. Author ofNuclear is for Life: A Cultural Revolution,[1]Radiation and Reason: The Impact of Science on a Culture of Fear[2], Fundamental Physics for Probing and Imaging[3]
Wade Allison was educated atRugby School and then atTrinity College, Cambridge as an Open Exhibitioner in Natural Science. He gained aFirst Class in Part I of theTripos, before taking Part II in Physics and Part III in Mathematics in 1963. AtOxford he studied for aDPhil in Particle Physics, on the way becoming the last student permitted to operate Oxford University's thermionic valveFerranti Mercury computer. He was elected to a Research Lecturership (JRF) atChrist Church, Oxford in 1967 and a Fellow of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. He spent two years at theArgonne National Laboratory before returning to Oxford in 1970.
In 1976 he was appointed a university lecturer in the Physics Department at Oxford, later with the title of professor. At the same time he was elected to a tutorial fellowship atKeble College. He was a visiting professor at theUniversity of Minnesota in 1995. During his career he served periods as associate chairman of the Oxford Physics Department, senior tutor and sub-warden of Keble College. He retired officially in 2008, since when he has continued to teach, lecture and study. He was elected to an emeritus fellowship at Keble College in 2010.[4]
His background is in experimental Particle Physics. In earlier years he developed new experimental methods with their theory, and applied these in experiments onquarks atCERN and onneutrinos in the USA. He made special studies on the fields of relativistic charged particles in matter includingCherenkov Radiation,Transition radiation and other mechanisms of energy loss,dEdx. As a result of initiating some years ago an optional student course on applications of nuclear physics, his interest became increasingly engaged withmedical physics, in particular safety, therapy and imaging across the full spectrum:ionizing radiation,ultrasound andmagnetic resonance. In 2006 he published an advanced student text bookFundamental Physics for Probing and Imaging. In his second bookRadiation and Reason he brought the scientific evidence of the effect of radiation to a wider audience. After the Fukushima accident this was translated into Japanese and Chinese. His third bookNuclear is for Life is a broad study that contrasts the cultural rejection of nuclear energy with the evidence, at all but the highest levels, for the harmless, and even beneficial, interaction of radiation with life.
