
Today, thousands of scientists are health physicists or use neutron beams from reactors and accelerator-based sources to determine the arrangements, motions and magnetic characteristics of atoms in materials. He pioneered the fields of health physics and neutron scattering research in the 1940s when the nuclear reactor was in its infancy. Below is Carolyn’s article on Ernie Wollan, using information she obtained from the Fromes, Oak Ridge Associated Universities Consultant Paul Frame, a journal paper by ORNL Director Thomas Mason et al., The Oak Ridger, Wikipedia and John Wollan.Įrnest Omar Wollan (1902-1984) had one of the most distinguished résumés a scientist could have, except, because of an unfortunate delay, he did not win the Nobel Prize many thought he richly deserved. Wollan and Clifford Shull together pioneered the field of neutron scattering using the world’s first continuously operating nuclear reactor, the Graphite Reactor at ORNL.Īfter the ceremony, John Wollan stopped by the Oneida Lane house he grew up in and shared information with Ann and Ed.

It is now the Shull Wollan Center: A Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences. Last September, John Wollan, a former physicist at Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory, was invited to ORNL for the official renaming ceremony for the Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences, managed by ORNL and the University of Tennessee. In 1959, Addie died of cancer, and in 1984 Ernie died of pneumonia in Edina, Minn., but he was buried next to his wife in Oak Ridge Memorial Park. They were avid golfers and among the first members of the Oak Ridge Country Club. The Wollans were charter members of Grace Lutheran Church, and Ernie was instrumental in getting the original structure built. “Ed used the statistical methods he developed to analyze the data collected by radiation workers’ film badges based on Ernie’s invention.” Ed Frome, a retired ORNL statistician, had an “impressive tie to Ernie,” Ann said. In the Wollan house, which has a glorious view of the Cumberland Mountains, Ernie and his wife Addie (Adelaide) raised a daughter, Katherine, and two sons, Tom and John. “He was a man of dignity,” Ann told Carolyn after asking her to consider writing about Wollan for this “Historically Speaking” column. The Fromes bought his house at 107 Oneida Lane in 1977 when he decided to leave Oak Ridge for his home state of Minnesota to be near his daughter.

Wollan, one of the most renowned physicists who worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Ann and Ed Frome, who attend the same church as Carolyn Krause, have long been interested in the career of the late Ernest O.
