Henryk Niewodniczanski

Henryk Niewodniczański was a Polish physicist, professor at the Jagiellonian University and the creator and director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków. He graduated from the Stefan Batory University in Wilno in 1924 and received his PhD from the same university in 1926. He worked in various universities and laboratories in Germany and England, where he studied optics of metals, molecular optics, and nuclear physics. He discovered magnetic dipole radiation in the spectrum of lead vapors in 1934. He returned to Poland in 1937 and worked in Poznań and Wilno until the outbreak of World War II. After the war, he obtained the Chair of Experimental Physics at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where he developed and organized the research and teaching of physics. He initiated and led the construction of a small cyclotron C-48 and later acquired a Soviet-made cyclotron U-120, which became the basis of the Institute of Nuclear Physics that he founded in 1952. He was also the director of the Institute of Physics of the Jagiellonian University. He was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded several honors and medals for his scientific achievements and contributions. He died of a heart attack in 1968. In 1988, the Institute of Nuclear Physics he created was renamed The Henryk Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics.