Andrew Lang (physicist)

Andrew Richard Lang FRS CBE (9 February 1924 – 30 June 2008) was a British scientist and crystallographer.[1]

He was born in St Annes-on-Sea, Lancashire, UK. He obtained a First-Class Honours London External BSc in Physics at Exeter in 1944, a London External MSc in 1947 and a Cambridge PhD in 1953.

He worked in industrial research in the UK for Lever Brothers and Unilever Ltd and in the US for Philips Laboratories, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. He was Assistant Professor of Physical Metallurgy at Harvard University (1954–1959) before moving to a Lectureship in Physics at the University of Bristol in 1960. He spent the remainder of his career in Bristol, gaining promotion to Reader in 1966 and to Professor of Physics in 1979.[2] He retired in 1987.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975.[3]

He won the 1997 Hughes Medal of the Royal Society "for his fundamental work on X-ray diffraction physics and for his developments of the techniques of X-ray topography, in particular in studying defects in crystal structures".[4]