John Gordon Rushbrooke

John Gordon Rushbrooke (1963-2003) was an Australian particle physicist.

The son of Neil and Vera Rushbrooke, with four sisters, John was born in Geelong in 1936 and brought up there. He attended Geelong Grammar School, where he was at the top of every class.

He went on to Trinity Collage, graduating BSc in 1956. Rushbrooke went on to a master's degree doing experiments at Australia's first cyclotron, where Rushbrooke began his work as a high-energy physicist, probing the atom. His thesis from the University of Melbourne was on Coulomb excitations of the atom.

In 1959 Rushbrooke wan a scholarship that took him to King's College, Cambridge. Following work in the Cavendish Laboratory and graduation as a PhD, Rushbrooke spent a year at CERN, before returning to Cambridge and the Cavendish with a fellowship at Downing College, where he was director of studies in physics.

For five years from 1977 he was on leave from his duties at Cambridge, based again at CERN, where he functioned as the spokesperson for the UA5 collaboration. The UA5 experiment searched for Centauro events at the Proton-Antiproton Collider, a modification of the Super Proton Synchrotron.

In 1983 Rushbrooke was promoted to a readership in physics at Cambridge, and in 1991 the university conferred on him a second doctorate.. During the 90s Rushbrooke worked on commercializing technology from scanning techniques developed at CERN, and moved to California in 2000 after securing a contract with a major US company. Rushbrooke died in California in 2003, at the age of 67.

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