James Duderstadt

James Johnson Duderstadt (1942 to 2024) was an American nuclear physicist and academic administrator. Born in Fort Madison, Iowa, he studied at Yale and took his doctorate at Caltech in 1968, then taught nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan and worked at the NASA Lewis Research Center, the Army Missile Command and Argonne National Laboratory. He wrote the textbooks Nuclear Reactor Analysis, with Louis J. Hamilton, in 1976 and Inertial Confinement Fusion, with Gregory A. Moses, in 1982. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987 for contributions to nuclear science and engineering relating to fission and fusion energy systems and reactor theory and design, and he served on the Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee of the Department of Energy. He was dean of engineering, provost and from 1988 to 1996 president of the University of Michigan, and the National Science Board gave him its Vannevar Bush Award in 2015.