Dr. D. Allan Bromley
Science advisor to President George H.W. Bush
1989 - 1993

Dr. Bromley, who was scheduled to participate in the series in March, passed away on February 10, 2005.  We send our condolences to his family and friends.  In memoriam of Dr. Bromley.

One of the world’s leading nuclear physicists, Dr. D. Allan Bromley was founder and Director of the A. W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Yale from 1963-1989. He has carried out pioneering studies on both the structure and dynamics of nuclei and is considered the father of modern heavy ion science, one of the major areas of nuclear science. From 1972 until 1993 he held the Henry Ford II Professorship in Physics at Yale and from 1970 to 1977 served as chairman of the Yale Physics Department. An outstanding teacher, over the 1965-1989 period his Laboratory at Yale graduated more Ph.D.s in experimental nuclear physics than any other institution, worldwide. He has published over 500 papers in science and technology as well as edited or authored twenty books and has received numerous honors and awards, including, in 1988, the National Medal of Science, the highest U.S. scientific award.

For more than two decades, Dr. Bromley has been a leader in the national and international science and science policy communities. As chairman of the National Academy’s Physics Survey in the early 1970s, he contributed in a central way to charting the future of that science in the subsequent decade. As president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest scientific society, and of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, the world coordinating body for that science, he has been one of the leading spokesmen for U.S. science and for international scientific cooperation.

The first person to hold the Cabinet level rank of The Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Dr. Bromley increased both the staff and budget of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy by factors of more than five between 1989 and 1993. He revitalized and chaired the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering and Technology and achieved an unprecedented level of cooperation and communication among the more than twenty federal agencies that support U.S. science and technology. For the first time, he published a formal statement of U.S. Technology Policy and played a central role in greatly expanding cooperation between the federal government and the private sector toward more effective utilization of technology throughout U.S. society.

He also served as chairman of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the Intergovernmental Council on Science, Engineering and Technology. During the Bush Administration he testified 42 times before Congressional Committees and delivered more than 400 addresses to major audiences across this country and around the world as the senior representative of American science and technology.

Prior to his appointment to the Bush Administration, Dr. Bromley served as a member of the White House Science Council throughout the Reagan Administration and as a member of the National Science Board in 1988-89.

Born in Westmeath, Ontario, Canada, he received the B.Sc. degree with highest honors in 1948 in the Faculty of Engineering at Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada. He received the M.Sc. degree from Queen’s University in 1950 and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Rochester in 1952, both degrees in nuclear physics. He subsequently has been awarded thirty-two honorary doctorates from universities in Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa and the United States.

He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, of the Royal South African Academy of Sciences, Academician of the International Higher Education Academy of Sciences, Moscow, and a Benjamin Franklin Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London.

He was President of the American Physical Society in 1997 and a member of the Governing Board of the American Institute of Physics from 1995 to 1998.

During his APS Presidency he has played a leadership role in coordinating the activities of 110 American scientific and technological professional societies representing more than 3.5 million scientists, mathematicians and engineers in support of continuing federal investment in academic science and technology. He also hosted and organized a meeting of the presidents of the major physical societies and regional societies worldwide for discussion of common problems and opportunities.

He serves on a number of Presidential commissions and on the Boards of Directors of several private sector corporations; he is a founding partner of the Washington Advisory Group LLC.