Biography: James Edward Young
James Edward Young is a prominent African American physicist and Professor of Physics, Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusettes. He is 99 years old.
Born in Wheeling on January 18, 1926, Young graduated from Lincoln High School in 1941.
According to his MIT biography, he graduated from Howard University with a bachelor’s in physics in 1946. From 1946 to 1949 he taught physics at Hampton Institute in Virginia. He simultaneously worked on a masters degree in physics at Howard University, in absentia, before joining the staff of the Acoustics Laboratory at MIT as Research Assistant in 1949.
Young received his MS degree, without specification, from MIT. He stayed on to earn his PhD in Physics in 1953, with a dissertation entitled “Propagation of Sound In Attenuating Ducts Containing Absorptive Strips,” and completed a one-year Post-doctoral Fellow in Acoustics in 1954. He returned to the Institute in 1969 as a Visiting Professor, earning tenure the following year in the Department of Physics.
In 1970, he made history as his department’s first Black tenured faculty member, a position he held until 1992, before becoming an emeritus professor.
Dr. Young researched and taught theoretical particle physics, critical phenomena and nuclear physics in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.
As a founding member of the National Society of Black Physicists, Young is well-known for mentoring two pioneering and exceptionally promising MIT doctoral students: Shirley Ann Jackson ’68, PhD ’73 and Sylvester James Gates, Jr. ’73, PhD ’77. Both would go on to distinguished careers, including appointments by two U.S. presidents.
