Richard Garwin

Who is Richard Garwin?

Richard Lawrence Garwin, is an American physicist. He received his bachelor's degree from the Case Institute of Technology in 1947 and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1949, where he worked in the lab of Enrico Fermi. Fermi said that Garwin was the only true genius he had ever met.

Garwin is IBM Fellow Emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. For many years he was an adjunct professor of physics at Columbia University and, from 1952, a scientist at the IBM Watson Laboratory at Columbia University, retiring from IBM in 1993. He has also been an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.

Garwin received the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for the fields of science and engineering, award year 2002.

Among other things, Garwin was the author of the actual design used in the first hydrogen bomb in 1952. He was assigned the job by Edward Teller, with the instructions that he was to make it as conservative a design as possible in order to prove the concept was feasible.