Stanislaw Mrozowski

Stanisław Mrozowski was a Polish-born American physicist who made significant contributions to the fields of spectroscopy and carbon physics. He was born in Warsaw in 1902 and developed an interest in science as a teenager, founding the Polish Amateur Astronomical Society and publishing a bulletin called Urania. He volunteered for the Polish army in 1920 and fought in the defense of Warsaw and Grodno, earning the Cross of Valor. He graduated from the University of Warsaw in 1925 and then pursued his doctoral studies in physics, working with Czesław Białobrzeski and visiting various European laboratories. He obtained his PhD in 1929 and became an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw, where he devised a novel method of studying atomic structures using a type of Zeeman filter, now known as the Mrozowski filter. He was invited to the first international congress of photoluminescence in Warsaw in 1936 and gained recognition from the international physics community. In 1939, he went to the University of California, Berkeley, to spend a year with Ernest Orlando Lawrence, but the outbreak of World War II prevented him from returning to Poland. He then joined Robert Sanderson Mulliken at the University of Chicago, where he worked as a professor at George Williams College. He also participated in the Manhattan Project at Princeton University. In 1944, he was hired by the Great Lakes Carbon Corp to lead a research team on carbon physics, which marked the beginning of his career in this field. In 1949, he moved to the University of Buffalo, where he established a doctoral program and a research group on carbon physics. He became the director of the Carbon Research Laboratory and founded the international journal Carbon, which he edited for 20 years. He also maintained active contacts with the Polish scientific and cultural community in the US, working with the Kosciuszko Foundation and the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America. He retired from Buffalo in 1972 and then worked part-time at Ball State University until the 1990s. He received the honorary doctorate from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in 1990, the Kosciuszko Medal in 1991, and the Officer's Cross of the Polonia Restituta Cross in 1993. He died in Fort Lauderdale in 1999.