PHYSICIST

Nobel Prize Winner.

The winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1938, Enrico Fermi played a prominent role in the harnessing of nuclear energy and the development of the atomic bomb.

Early Years.

Born in Rome, Italy, Fermi earned a doctorate at the University of Pisa in 1922 and spent the next two years abroad on a fellowship that allowed him to study with physicists Max Born in Göttingen and Paul Ehrenfest in Leiden. Returning to Italy in 1924, he became a lecturer in Florence, and by 1927 he had earned a reputation as a leader in the international community of theoretical physics. In that year he was appointed to the first Italian chair of theoretical physics, established at the University of Rome. During the 1930s he experimented with initiating nuclear reactions by bombarding atomic nuclei with neutrons, the work for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1938. Earlier that year the passage of Fascist...