Ward Plummer

Earl Ward Plummer (October 30, 1940 – July 23, 2020) was an American physicist. His main contributions were in surface physics of metals. Plummer was a professor of physics at Louisiana State University, University of Pennsylvania and the University of Tennessee - Knoxville.

Biography Plummer received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Lewis & Clark College in 1962 and completed his Ph.D. degree in physics at Cornell University in 1967, working with Prof. Thor Rhodin. His thesis work was on atomic binding of 5-d transition-metal atoms using Field ion microscope (FIM).

Plummer accepted a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Bureau of Standards (now called The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)) in the fall of 1967 working with Russ Young, and he stayed as a staff scientist until the fall of 1973. where his work mainly focused on angle-resolved photoemission, momentum-resolved inelastic electron scattering and nonlinear optical response from surfaces. In 1988, he was appointed the William Smith Professor of Physics and in 1990 became the director of the NSF-funded Materials Research Laboratory (Laboratory for Research on Structure of Matter).

Awards and honors 1968 Wayne B. Nottingham Prize 1983 Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics from the American Physical Society for "---the innovative application of electron spectroscopies." 1986 Guggenheim Fellowship 2001 Medard W. Welch Award by the American Vacuum Society. The citation reads, "For the development of novel instrumentation, its use to illuminate new concepts in the surface physics of metals, and the mentoring of promising young scientists." 2006 Elected to National Academy of Sciences 2014 Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2017 International Science and Technology Cooperation Award of the People's Republic of China 2017 LSU Boyd Professor

Academic genealogy Ward Plummer was a student of Thor Rhodin... Thor Rhodin was a student of Hugh Scott Taylor. Taylor was a student of Frederick George Donnan and Henry Bassett [Ref.1]. Donnan was trained by Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald. Ostwald's adviser was Carl Schmidt. who was a student of Justus von Liebig. Bassett was trained by Adolf von Baeyer and Victor Villiger. Baeyer was a student of Robert Bunsen and Friedrich August Kekulé. Bunsen was a student of Friedrich Stromeyer. Kekulé was a student of Heinrich Will.

Selected publications

Allyn, C. L., Gustafsson, T., Plummer E. W., Orientation of Co adsorbed on Ni(100), Chemical Physics Letters, 47 (1): 127-132, 1977