John Dawson, 71; Invented Isotope Separation Process

John M. Dawson, 71, an internationally known professor of physics at UCLA whose invention of an isotope separation process has been used to save many lives from prostate cancer, died in his sleep Nov. 17.

Dawson was a leading figure in the physics of high-temperature plasmas for more than four decades, and his scientific contributions span all of plasma physics. He is regarded as the father of both plasma-based accelerators and the computer simulation of plasmas.

Born in Champaign, Ill., he earned his doctorate in physics from the University of Maryland in 1957. He worked as a research physicist and professor at Princeton University from 1956 to 1973 before joining the UCLA faculty.

Dawson received many awards, including the Maxwell Prize and the Aneesur Rahman Prize--the highest honors in the American Physical Society’s plasma physics and computational physics divisions.