David Arthur Shirley (March 30, 1934 – March 29, 2021) was an American chemist, best known as the fourth director of the

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), commonly referred to as the Berkeley Lab, is a United States Department of Energy National Labs, United States national laboratory that is owned by, and conducts scientific research on behalf of, t ...

from 1980 to 1989, and for spearheading the funding and creation of the Advanced Light Source.

Biography

David Arthur Shirley was born in North Conway, New Hampshire, on March 30, 1934. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in

chemistry Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...

from the University of Maine in 1955, and then entered the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his

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, writing his 1959 doctoral thesis on "The heat capacities and entropies of iodine and lithium chloride from 15 to 325 degrees Kelvin", under the supervision of William Giauque. Shirley married Virginia Schultz in 1956, and they had five children together, David, Diane, Michael, Eric and Gail Shirley. Shirley has a total of eleven grandchildren, Brian, Arthur, Kevin, Colleen, Sarah, Lauren, Catalina, Wendell, Wilbur, Darian and Madelyn. Shirley became a lecturer in chemistry at Berkeley in 1959, an assistant professor in 1960, an

associate professor Associate professor is an academic title with two principal meanings: in the North American system and that of the ''Commonwealth system''. Overview In the ''North American system'', used in the United States and many other countries, it is a ...

in 1964, and a full professor in 1967. The following year he became chairman of the Chemistry Department. He was a National Science Foundation fellow at Oxford University in 1966–67, and was awarded the United States Atomic Energy Commission's

Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award was established in 1959 in honor of a scientist who helped elevate American physics to the status of world leader in the field. E. O. Lawrence was the inventor of the cyclotron, an accelerator of subatomic parti ...

in 1972. His early research was into low temperature physics,

nuclear orientation Nuclear orientation, in nuclear physics, is the directional ordering of an assembly of nuclear spins with respect to some axis in space. It is one of the nuclear spectroscopy methods. A nuclear level with spin in a magnetic field will divide into ...

, and hyperfine interactions, particularly the Mössbauer effect, and he was a pioneer of X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. In 1975, Shirley became the Associate Laboratory Director and Head, Materials and Molecular Research Division of the

. He was its fourth director, from 1980 to 1989, and was the first chemist to head the laboratory. He took the helm at a time when the laboratory had to deal with deep funding cuts, and spent most of his first two years in the job managing them. Having weathered the crisis, he attempted to prevent its recurrence by broadening the range of research projects, such as research into treatments for

ocular melanoma Uveal melanoma is a type of eye cancer in the uvea of the eye. It is traditionally classed as originating in the iris, choroid, and ciliary body, but can also be divided into class I (low metastatic risk) and class II (high metastatic risk). Symp ...

, and development of

Mina Bissell Mina J. Bissell is an Iranian-American biologist known for her research on breast cancer. In particular, she has studied the effects of a cell's microenvironment, including its extracellular matrix, on tissue function. Early life and education ...

's extracellular matrix model of breast cancer. In 1987, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory was chosen to participate in the

Human Genome Project The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying, mapping and sequencing all of the genes of the human genome from both a ...

. Another initiative was the Center for Advanced Materials (CAM). In turn, this led to the establishment of the Center for X-Ray Optics (CXRO), the world's first research facility devoted to specialise in the use of soft x-rays and extreme ultraviolet light known as XUV. As it turned out, these are ideal for manipulating the atoms and molecules on materials' surfaces, where most chemical reactions take place. In 1984, Shirley proposed the construction of the Advanced Light Source, a

synchrotron A synchrotron is a particular type of cyclic particle accelerator, descended from the cyclotron, in which the accelerating particle beam travels around a fixed closed-loop path. The magnetic field which bends the particle beam into its closed p ...

optimized to produce XUV. Not everyone saw the value in it, but the scientific case was sound, and Shirley eventually secured $100 million of funding from the Secretary of Energy,

John S. Herrington John Stewart Herrington (born May 31, 1939) is an American Republican politician. He served as the United States Secretary of Energy under Ronald Reagan during his second term. Biography Herrington was born in Los Angeles, California, and ea ...

. It was the first synchrotron to be built at Berkeley in almost thirty years, and was built on the site of

Ernest Lawrence Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was an American nuclear physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron. He is known for his work on uranium-isotope separation f ...

's 184-inch synchrotron. Shirley stepped down as director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on August 31, 1989, but remained at Berkeley as a professor. In 1992 he accepted a position as senior vice president for research and graduate education at

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvan ...

. He increased the number of minorities in graduate school, and reduced the average time to graduate. Although this was a time when the United States Congress was cutting Federal funding for research, he positioned the university so as to make the best of available opportunities, and cemented its place as the premier state university in the country for research funding from industry. He retired at the end of 1996, and returned to California with his second wife, Barbara.

Notes

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Shirley, David Arthur 1934 births 2021 deaths 21st-century American chemists People from North Conway, New Hampshire University of California faculty Pennsylvania State University faculty Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory people University of Maine alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni