George B. Pegram

George Braxton Pegram (October 24, 1876 – August 12, 1958) was an American physicist who played a key role in the technical administration of the Manhattan Project. He graduated from Trinity College (now Duke University) in 1895, and taught high school before becoming a teaching assistant in physics at Columbia University in 1900. He was to spend the rest of his working life at Columbia, taking his doctorate there in 1903 and becoming a full professor in 1918. His administrative career began as early as 1913 when he became the department's executive officer. By 1918, he was Dean of the Faculty of Applied Sciences but he resigned in 1930 to relaunch his research activities, performing many meticulous measurements on the properties of neutrons with John R. Dunning. He was also chairman of Columbia's physics department from 1913 to 1945.

Returning to administration as Dean in 1936, Pegram met Enrico Fermi on his arrival in the United States. In 1940 he brokered a meeting between Fermi and the US Navy at which the prospect of an atomic bomb was raised with the military for the first time. Following Marcus Oliphant's mission to the United States in August 1941 to alert the Americans to its feasibility, Pegram and his colleague Harold C. Urey led a diplomatic mission to the United Kingdom to establish co-operation on development of the atomic bomb. They soon found themselves on Vannevar Bush's S-1 Section coordinating technical research. Columbia's physics department was home to the SAM Laboratories, where many of the key technologies required for the bomb were developed.

After the war Pegram helped found the Brookhaven National Laboratory. He served as vice president of the university 1949 to 1950.