Professor Emeritus James J. Griffin died on December 13, 2022.
Griffin earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Princeton University in 1956 and then accepted a Fulbright Scholarship to the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. Following a National Science Foundation Fellowship at the University of Birmingham and an appointment as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, he joined UMD as an assistant professor in 1966. He was promoted to associate professor and full professor in 1968 and 1973, respectively. In the 1968-69 academic year, Griffin served as Associate Chair of the UMD Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Griffin studied nuclear structure and heavy ions, and was perhaps best known for his publication, “The statistical model of intermediate structure,” which appeared in Physical Review Letters. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to work at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1972-73. In 1975, he received an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior Scientist Fellowship and worked at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen and the Hahn Meitner Institute for Nuclear Research in Berlin.
During his career, Griffin also enjoyed visiting positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of California in Berkeley, and several institutions in France and Germany. He was an invited guest lecturer in Germany, Canada, Poland, China, Israel, Japan, France and Romania.
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