University of Surrey awards honorary doctorate to Professor Richard Casten
Wednesday 25 June 2008
The University of Surrey is proud to confer the honorary degree of Doctor of the University to Professor Richard Casten for his work in the field of nuclear physics. The award was made on Tuesday, June 17 at Guildford Cathedral.
Professor Richard Casten is the D. Allan Bromley Distinguished Professor of Physics, Yale University and since 1995 has been the Director of the Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory, Yale University USA. He has been a major figure in international nuclear structure physics research for 40 years and has co-authored more than 500 refereed scientific articles in the subject leading to over 7,000 citations in the scientific literature.
Since 1997 he has acted as mentor and research director to a series of University of Surrey MPhys and PhD students in nuclear physics. Prior to his laboratory directorship at Yale he spent more than 20 years as a Senior Research Scientist and Nuclear Structure Group Leader at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York. He has held a number of major appointments of note in world-wide nuclear physics research including Chairing the US Department of Energy Nuclear Science Advisory Committee and is the current Chair of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society. His scientific achievements include the invention of the symmetry or ‘Casten’ triangle to describe nuclear properties in terms of algebraic symmetries and the proton-neutron valence scheme to describing nuclear properties. His textbook, ‘Nuclear Structure from a Simple Perspective’ remains a seminal work in the field.
