Ronald Wilfred Gurney

Ronald Wilfrid Gurney (1 July 1898 – 14 April 1953) was a British theoretical, solid-state, and chemical physicist and research pupil of Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge University during the 1920s. He moved to Princeton University in 1926-1928 on a International Education Board and Commonwealth Fund fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to work with Karl Compton. He was granted a Japanese research fellowship to work at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research for 1929. Upon returning to England in 1930, he first worked as a researcher at Cambridge University and then moved to the University of Manchester as a teaching fellow. He was appointed as a George Wills Research Associateship at Bristol University in 1933 and worked with Nevill Mott. He moved to the US after the start of World War II,

Radioactive decay processes Whilst at the Palmer Physical Laboratory at Princeton University from 1926 to 1928,

Contributions to solid-state physics Gurney contributed to the understanding of the formation of latent image formation on photographic plates and the theory of color centers or F-centers in ionic solids in collaboration with Nevill Mott.

Mott and Gurney's book Electronic Processes in Ionic Crystals was published ni 1940 during World War II and influenced a generation of solid-state physicists.

Books Elementary Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press, 1934. Ions in Solution, Cambridge University Press, 1936. Electronic Processes in Ionic Crystals, Oxford University Press, 1940 (with N.F. Mott) Introduction to Statistical Mechanics, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, 1949. Ionic Processes in Solution, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1953.