Donald F. Holcomb

Donald Frank Holcomb (November 8, 1925 – August 9, 2018) was an American physicist.

Born in Chesterton, Indiana, on November 8, 1925, Holcomb was raised in primarily in Wood River, Illinois, and graduated from East Alton-Wood River High School in 1943. His university studies were interrupted by military service in the United States Navy. After obtaining a bachelor's degree from DePauw University in 1949, Holcomb pursued graduate study at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, completing a Ph.D. in 1954. He began teaching at Cornell University that same year. In 1964, Holcomb became the third director of the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics.^[1] In his career, Holcomb spent some time abroad. He received a Sloan Research Fellowship from 1955 to 1957, was named a NATO senior visiting fellow at the University of Oslo in 1962, a Guggenheim fellow in 1968 while at the University of Kent, and a Science Research Council visiting fellow at University of St. Andrews in 1978. He was granted fellowship into the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.^[2] The American Association of Physics Teachers awarded Holcomb its Oersted Medal in 1996,^[3] a year after his retirement from Cornell.^[2] He died at home in Ithaca, New York, on August 9, 2018, aged 92.^[2]