A New Zealand-born British physicist and chemist. A pioneer in radioactivity and nuclear physics, he is widely regarded as the "father of nuclear physics." He studied radioactive decay, alpha and beta rays, and radon, and in 1911 proposed a nuclear model of the atom centered around a nucleus based on the results of the gold foil scattering experiment. In 1917, he achieved an artificial nuclear reaction, leading to research that resulted in the discovery of the proton. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 and served as the director of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge from 1919. Under his leadership, James Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932, and John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton successfully split an atomic nucleus artificially.

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