Prize Recipient

Charles F. Perdrisat
College of William and Mary

"For groundbreaking measurements of nucleon structure, and discovering the unexpected behavior of the magnetic and electric nucleon form factors with changing momentum transfer."

Charles F. Perdrisat, Ph.D., was a professor at the College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, Va.) for the last 50 years having retired earlier this year. Throughout his career, Dr. Perdrisat’s research focus included nuclear reactions with proton and deuteron beams, both polarized and unpolarized. He conducted research at SATURNE in Saclay, France, TRIUMF in Vancouver, B.C., LAMPF in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., and JINR in Dubna, Russia. During the last half of his career, he was committed to the investigation of the structure of the proton at Jefferson Laboratory, concentrating in obtaining polarization transfer data in the scattering of polarized electrons on unpolarized protons. These data, from 3 distinct experiments organized in close collaboration with Vina Punjabi, Ph.D., Mark K. Jones, Ph.D., Edward J. Brash, Ph.D., and Lubomir Pentchev, Ph.D., have resulted in a significant change of paradigm in the understanding of the structure of the nucleon. After completing his undergraduate training in physics and mathematics at the University of Geneva in 1956, Dr. Perdrisat became an assistant in the physics department at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) in Switzerland, under Prof. Paul Scherrer; he received his Ph.D. in 1962. He completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, before heading to William and Mary in 1966.

2017 Selection Committee Members: Rocco Schiavilla (Chair), D. Hertzog, P. Jacobs, Kate Jones, I-Y. Lee