DAVID BRINK
(Tasmania & Magdalen 1951) (20 July 1930 - 8 March 2021)
David Brink obtained a BSc from the University of Tasmania in 1951, and then moved to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. His DPhil, 'Some Aspects of the Interactions of Fields with Matter' was awarded in 1955. David was a Royal Society Rutherford Scholar from 1954-1958 and during this period he spent a year at MIT. He was appointed Fellow of Balliol College and Lecturer in Theoretical Physics at Oxford in 1958.
David was a nuclear theorist who contributed very significantly to our understanding of nuclear structure and nuclear reactions. His book Angular Momentum is a classic introduction to the topic.
David was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1981. He was awarded the Rutherford medal of the Institute of Physics and the Lise Meitner prize for nuclear science of the European Physical Society, and was honoured as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of Sciences of Uppsala. At Oxford he held the position of H.J.G. Mosley Reader between 1988 and 1993. After Oxford, David moved to Trento where he was Vice-Director of ECT, the European Centre for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics, and Professor of the History of Physics at the Universita degli Studi di Trento.