Jens Rud Nielsen

Personal life Nielsen was born to Niels F. Nielsen and Marie (Johansen) Nielsen on September 22, 1894. He married Gertrude Siegmund, who would become an active public servant physician, He went on to get a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology – one of its first to ever have been granted – while spending a year teaching at Humboldt State College. He was employed at the University of Oklahoma from the fall of 1924 on a starting salary of $2,400, and he quickly became acclaimed across the campus for his passion and enthusiasm for research. He and Niels Bohr became such good friends during that time that Bohr would later come halfway across the globe to visit him in 1937 and 1957. It was during the same year of this conference that Niels Bohr would come to visit Nielsen in the United States, though the exact dates of his visit are unknown.

At the University of Oklahoma, Nielsen – and in some respects his wife Gertrude too – were the ignition for the expansion of scientific research University wide. As principal organizer, Nielsen was asked to create a research program for the university's physics program; however, due to lack of space and financial problems, starting off he was forced to use heat tunnels and old washrooms in the place of laboratories. Overcoming this obstacle, he maintained a career of forty-one years through perhaps some of the world's darkest hours – between the Great Depression (during which he and his wife helped fund several students' education) to the dropping of the atomic bomb. During his time at the University of Oklahoma, Nielsen supervised half of the sixty physics Ph.D. students that would go on to graduate.

His early work on the photoelectric effect led him to be interested in microscopic imaging, specifically Raman. Nielsen had publications in numerous journals, including Journal of the Optical Society of America, Fysisk Tidsskrift, Physical Review, Review of Scientific Instruments, The Scientific Monthly, Science, and School Science and Mathematics.

Awards and honors On November 16, 1971, Nielsen was one of nine Oklahomans inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. George Lynn Cross, the University of Oklahoma's president at the time, referred to him as "Oklahoma's most distinguished scientist," and subsequently he was named as one of the first four recipients of the George Lynn Cross Professorship for outstanding research.