Dempster, Arthur Jeffrey, 1886-1950

Arthur Jeffrey Dempster was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago. Dempster joined the physics faculty at the University of Chicago in 1916 and remained there until his death in 1950.

During World War II he worked on the secret Manhattan Project to develop the world's first nuclear weapons. From 1943 to 1946, Dempster was chief physicist of the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory or "Met Lab" which integrally related to the Manhattan Project and founded to study the materials necessary for the manufacture of atomic bombs. In 1946, he took a position as a division director at the Argonne National Laboratory.

Dempster died on March 11, 1950 in Stuart, Florida at the age of 63.