William A. Fowler

William Alfred Fowler (1911 to 1995) was an American astrophysicist, born in Pittsburgh and raised in Lima, Ohio, who took his doctorate in nuclear physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1936 and spent his career at Caltech. He shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe. His research into nuclear reactions within stars and the energy and elements they produce was set out with Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge and Fred Hoyle in the influential 1957 paper Synthesis of the Elements in Stars, known as B2FH. In 1948 President Truman gave him the Medal for Merit, along with several Caltech colleagues.