Professor Harry J. (Zvi) Lipkin was born in New York in 1921. He graduated from Cornell in Electrical Engineering and obtained a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 1950. He then made Aliyah and soon was among the founders of the Nuclear Physics department at the Weizmann Institute. In 1960 he was acting head of the department. He consulted at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and reviewed proposals for gamma ray lasers for the US Defense Department. He was Visiting Professor in the leading universities and research institutions in the world.
In nuclear physics he developed a model now called the "Lipkin Model" in scientific literature studying the symmetries of nature and their breaking. He published approximately 500 articles containing new and original results in nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, theory of Moessbauer effect and elementary particle physics. His scientific contributions include ground-breaking work on the quark model and the use of symmetries in the investigation of strong interactions.
In the 1950's he was one of the founders of nuclear reactors in Israel, a senior member of the group that established centers of nuclear research and an advisor to Shimon Peres, then Director General of the Ministry of Defense.
During the struggle for Soviet Jewry he maintained active contacts with Jewish "refusenik" scientists and used his wide contacts to recruit top scientists in the world, including many Nobel laureates, to pressure the Soviet leaders. In recent years he has been active in improving systems for teaching reading in first grade.
