Herman Branson

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Herman Russell Branson (born August 14, 1914 in Pocahontas , Virginia , † June 7, 1995 ) was an African-American physicist ( biophysics ) and chemist.

Branson studied at Virginia State College with a bachelor's degree in 1936 and at the University of Cincinnati , where he received his doctorate in physics in 1939 with Boris Podolsky . With Podolsy he also published in 1940 on the quantization of mass. He was a post-doctoral student at Dillard University in New Orleans . From 1941 he was an assistant professor of physics and chemistry at Howard University . In 1944 he was given a full professorship in physics and headed the physics faculty from 1941 to 1968. In 1968 he became President of Central State University and in 1970 President of Lincoln University. In 1985 he retired.

From 1948 he was a guest resident at Caltech with Linus Pauling, and around 1951 he contributed to some of the fundamental publications on the secondary structure of proteins by Pauling and Robert B. Corey ( alpha helix , beta leaflet ). He had research interests in protein structure and mathematical biology, dealt with information theory in molecular biology, modeling of blood flow in arteries, use of radioactive isotopes in transport studies in biology and physicochemical studies of sickle cell anemia .

From 1972 he was a member of the National Research Council.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Podolsky, Branson: On the quantization of mass, Phys. Rev., Vol. 57, 1940, pp. 494-500. The attempt is made to obtain the electron mass as an eigenvalue problem of the Dirac equation in different cosmological spacetimes, but this turns out to be impossible, since either the radius of the universes is too small when the correct electron mass is assumed or the resulting mass is much too small when the universe is assumed to be realistic is.
  2. ^ Pauling, Corey, Branson: The Structure of Proteins: Two Hydrogen-Bonded Helical Configurations of the Polypeptide Chain, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 37, 1951, pp. 205-211
  3. ^ Branson: The flow of a viscous fluid in an elastic tube: a model of the femoral artery. Bull. Math. Biophys., Volume 7, 1945, pp. 181--188
personal data
SURNAME Branson, Herman
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Branson, Herman Russell
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist and chemist
DATE OF BIRTH August 14, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Pocahontas , Virginia
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 1995