Kazimierz Fajans

Kazimierz Fajans (Kasimir Fajans in many American publications; 1887–1975) was a Polish American physical chemist of Polish-Jewish origin and a pioneer in the science of radioactivity.

Education and career

He was born May 27, 1887, in Warsaw, Poland, to a family of Jewish background. After he had completed a secondary school in Warsaw (1904), he started studying chemistry in Germany: at first at the University in Leipzig, and then in Heidelberg and Zurich. In 1909 he was awarded a PhD degree for his research into the stereoselective synthesis of chiral compounds. In 1910 he undertook a job at the laboratory of Ernest Rutherford in Manchester, where the nucleus was discovered. Next Fajans returned to Germany where he took the position of an assistant and later became the assistant professor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe. He researched into radioactivity. In 1917 he took over the Faculty of Physical Chemistry at Munich University, and in 1932 became the Head of the Institute of Physical Chemistry established by the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1935 he left Germany due to the escalation of Nazi persecution. He stayed for a while in Cambridge and next moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States, where he joined the Faculty of the University of Michigan where he continued to work until the end of his life. He retired at age of seventy but never stopped working. He died May 18, 1975 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.