Melvin Preston

During his career, Professor Preston has had faculty positions at the Universities of Birmingham, Toronto, McMaster, and Saskatchewan, and visiting positions at the Niels Bohr Institute, Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories, University of Texas and Texas Tech University. He came to McMaster in 1953 as the only theorist and led the development of Theoretical Physics on this campus. After a few years at Saskatchewan, he has returned to McMaster and is active as Professor Emeritus.

He has been a Dean of Graduate Studies, a university Vice–President, and has had leadership roles in several academic organizations. As an undergraduate, he won the Gold Medal of the Putman Intercollegiate Mathematical Competition. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Prof. Preston’s early research interests were in radioactive transitions, an interest which led naturally into nuclear structure generally and the study of the weak interaction. He is the author of an advanced textbook on nuclear physics, very widely used throughout the 1960’s and 70’s, and still used in a revised edition. His present interests are in the structure of hadrons and in relativistic effects in nuclei; interests that involve using a range of basic concepts such as soliton theories, meson field theory, and quantum chromodynamics.