Lee Grodzins

Grodzins was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of David Melvin Grodzins and his wife Taube Grodzins, Jewish emigrants, with roots in Poland and Grodno, Belarus. The family settled in Manchester, New Hampshire, He began his career with General Electric as an assistant in the nuclear physics group at their research laboratory in Schenectady, New York, his thesis was titled "A Cloud Chamber Study of the Single Scattering of 2.5 MeV Positrons by Gold Nuclei". He taught for a year afterwards at Purdue. ==Career and research==

From 1955 to 1958, Grodzins was a researcher with the nuclear physics group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, probing the properties of the nuclei of atoms. In 1956 he married a biologist whom he met at Brookhaven, Lulu (1929–2019). The same year, together with Maurice Goldhaber and , Grodzins performed the , which determined that neutrinos have negative helicity. This work was important in our understanding of the weak interaction. There he also developed handheld devices that use X-ray fluorescence to determine the composition of metal alloys and to detect other materials. His sister Ethel Grodzins Romm was the President and CEO of Niton, Grodzins also developed devices to detect explosives, drugs and other contraband in luggage and cargo containers. Grodzins wrote more than 170 technical papers and held more than 60 US patents. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1964–65 and in 1971–72, and a Senior Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in 1980–81. ==Personal life and death==

His sister Anne Grodzins Lipow was a librarian and library science expert, and his sister Ethel was an author, project manager, CEO and co-chair of the Lyceum Society of the New York Academy of Sciences. His nephew is climate writer Joseph Romm. Grodzins was married to Anderson for 62 years until her death in 2019; the couple had two sons. Grodzins died in Weston, Massachusetts, on March 6, 2025, at the age of 98. ==References==