Henry Way Kendall

Henry died at the age of 72 in February 1999 in a diving accident while accompanying a National Geographic expedition in Florida.

Henry was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 9, 1926, and grew up in nearby Sharon. He was the first of three children of Henry P. Kendall, a businessman, and Evelyn Way Kendall.

He attended Deerfield Academy, a college preparatory school. Upon graduating in 1945 he entered the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and served on a troop transport during the winter of 1945-1946.

Thereafter he entered Amherst College, graduating with a major in mathematics in 1950, and enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a graduate student in physics.

He carried out his Ph.D. thesis research under the supervision of Martin Deutsch. It was an unsuccessful attempt to measure the Lamb shift in positronium.

Upon receiving his degree in 1955 Henry began his postdoctoral career at MIT and Brookhaven National Laboratory, and made his first foray into innovative instrumentation.

In 1956 he took a research position at Stanford University, attracted by the program of Robert Hofstadter that was measuring the size of atomic nuclei by means of elastic electron scattering.

He remained at Stanford until returning to MIT as a faculty member in 1961, becoming a full professor in 1967 and the Julius A. Stratton Professor of Physics in 1991.

He then spent five years in Robert Hofstadter's research group at Stanford University in the late 50's and early 60's, where he worked with Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor, studying the structure of protons and neutrons, using the university's 300 feet long linear electron accelerator. He developed a close working relationship with Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky at Stanford.

He then returned to the MIT Physics Department, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Henry Way Kendall shared the 1990 Nobel Prize for Physics with Jerome Isaac Friedman and Richard E. Taylor.

In addition to his membership in the National Academy of Sciences (elected in 1992), Henry Kendall was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the American Association of Arts and Sciences.

He was awarded a number of prizes in addition to the 1990 Nobel Prize. These included the Bertram Russell Society Award in 1982, the Environmental Leadership Award from the Tufts University’s Lincoln Filene Center in 1991.