Professor Victor Francis Hess, c mid-20th century

Victor Francis Hess, also known as Victor Franz Hess, 24 June 1883- 17 December 1964. He was an Austrian-American particle physicist. He is most known for winning the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics with Card David Anderson for their discovery of cosmic radiation. He studied at the University of Graz from 1901 to 1905, and received his PhD in 1910 from the University of Vienna. He then worked at the Institute for Radium Research, Academy of Austrian Sciences, from 1910 to 1920. He undertook the work that would later award him the Nobel Prize in these years, namely 1911 to 1913. He married his wife Maria Bertha Warner Breisky in 1920. He went to America in 1921, and worked at the United States Radium Corporation in New Jersey and as a consulting physicist for the US Bureau of Mines in Washington D.C. In returned to Graz in 1923, and was appointed as a professor in 1925. He then became a professor at the University of Innsbruck, and director of the Institute of Radiology, in 1931. He relocated to the US in 1938 as his wife was Jewish, to escape Nazi persecution. He became a naturalised citizen of the US in 1944. His wife died of cancer in 1955 and Hess remarried the same year to Elizabeth Hoenke, the woman who had nursed Marie in her last years. He died from Parkinson's disease in 1964, in New York.