| AdminHistory | James 'Phil' Elliott was born in Hampshire in 1929. He took mathematics at Southampton University, which included some physics teaching, and for his PhD he researched the structure of atomic nuclei under professor Hermann Jahn.
After receiving his PhD, he joined the Theoretical Physics Division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell in 1951, remining there until 1959. Following a visiting associate professorship at the University of Rochester in New York State between 1957 and 1958, he decided to pursue a university position, and joined the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Southampton in 1959. However in 1962 he was invited to take up a post at the new University of Sussex in Brighton, where he remained until he retired in 1994.
His research made important contributions the understanding of the structure of atomic nuclei. in the 1950s he proposed the SU(3) model to explain the rotational behaviour of nuclei. His later research while at Sussex contributed to the development of the interacting boson model. He recieved various awards for his work, including the Rutherford Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics in 1994, and he shared the 2002 Lise Meitner prize of the European Physical Society with Francesco Iachello. |