Walter H. Zinn
Asea Brown Boveri AB
December 10, 1906 - February 14, 2000
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Scientific Discipline: Engineering Sciences Membership Type:
Emeritus
(elected 1956)
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Walter Zinn was a physicist who helped cultivate nuclear energy as a civilian power source, as well as a suitable power source for military applications, such as submarines.
Zinn completed his PhD in physics at Columbia University in 1934. He worked as a researcher at Columbia and taught on the faculty at City College of New York until the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938. At that point, Zinn began collaborating on the Manhattan Project.
When World War II ended, Zinn assumed leadership of the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, a position that he held for 8 years. He led the development of several nuclear reactor development projects at Argonne, including the EBR-1 reactor, which was the first to produce electricity in the United States, and the design of a boiling-water reactor, which became the model for approximately one-third of the nuclear reactors in the United States . Zinn left Argonne in 1956 and established a nuclear engineering company in Florida, participating in the leadership of the company until his retirement in the 1980s.
Zinn was the first president of the American Nuclear Society and received several high honors for his work, including the Ford Family’s Atoms for Peace Award, the Enrico Fermi Award, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences as well as the National Academy of Engineering. During the 1960s, he served on the President’s Science Advisory Committee.
