Staff Biographies

Edward F. Hammel

Born January 6, 1918, in New York City, Edward F. Hammel in 1939 graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College with a BA in chemistry. He received a PhD in physical chemistry from Princeton University in 1944. From 1941 to early 1944, Ed Hammel was an OSRD research associate for an early Manhattan District contract working on heavy-water production and later diffusion-barrier research.

Ed Hammel came to Los Alamos in May 1944 and began working in the plutonium facility with specific responsibilities for remelting, alloying, and casting of the material having the code name "49." After the war, Hammel continued working with plutonium in a program to determine that element's physical properties. His interests then shifted to studies of low-temperature physics, and in 1948, he and a small team were the first scientists to liquefy pure He3.

For twenty-five years, Hammel was the group leader of the Low-Temperature Physics and Cryoengineering group, CMF-9. In 1970, Hammel returned to research, working on energy issues. In 1973, he became Q Division's associate division leader and in 1974, assistant laboratory director for energy. He retired from the Laboratory in 1979.