J. B. Gunn

Meacham, Gunn, Hughes, Wood family picture in 1935. Back Row: Charles S. Meacham (chemist, brewer, painter), Florence Meacham (painter) - -Second Row: Battiscombe Gunn, son in law (Egyptologist), Wendy Wood, daughter (Scottish nationalist), Meena Gunn, daughter (Freudian psychoanalyst) - Third Row: Mary Barnish, granddaughter, with Meena's dog, Spike Hughes, grandson (Musician, critic), Bobbie Hughes granddaughter-in-law - Fourth (front) Row: Ian Gunn, grandson (Physicist), Angela Hughes, great-granddaughter.

Ian Gunn with his dog Tanya. Except for his time at UBC, where they were banned from faculty housing, he always had at least one dog, usually a Samoyed.

John Battiscombe "J. B." Gunn (13 May 1928 – 2 December 2008), known as Ian or Iain, was a British physicist, who spent most of his career in the United States. He discovered the Gunn effect, which led to the invention of the Gunn diode, the first inexpensive source of microwave power that did not require vacuum tubes. He described it himself as "I took two years of the natural sciences - physics, chemistry, mathematics and so on. In the last year I was able to switch to electronic engineering, which was something that was just started at Cambridge at that time." .

Gunn's research papers on solid state physics and electronics relate to microwave oscillations, lattice wave amplification, the Hall effect, quantum electronics, and applications of microwave oscillations to astrophysics.

Research in other fields Gunn stopped working on semiconductor physics in 1972, and pursued a number of different interests in his role as IBM Fellow. He spent nearly three years developing an APL computer model of a computer-controlled car, which showed that fuel consumption could be halved.

(IEEE Student Journal May 1969