Emlyn Hughes

More Radioactive than Chernobyl...

Over the past five years, I have been studying the impact of the US nuclear weapons testing program, performed in the 1940s and 1950s, in the Marshall Islands. This program deeply affected the people, the land and the lagoons, and the consequences from these tests are still a major issue for the Marshallese people today. At the Institute, I would like to take a look at the French nuclear weapons testing program in French Polynesia. I also plan to develop a new global core course on the topic of nuclear weapons and nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. I am interested in piloting this course in a seminar at Reid Hall in the summer of 2020.

Emlyn Hughes is a Professor of Physics at Columbia University and the founding director of the K=1 Project: Center for Nuclear Studies. He is an author of over 800 refereed publications in particle, nuclear, and atomic physics. Among other distinctions, he is a Fellow at the American Physical Society and the winner of the Feynman Teaching Award at the California Institute of Technology. He is currently performing an assessment of radioactive contamination in the Marshall Islands from the US nuclear weapons testing program, as well as developing a new course on nuclear weapons and nuclear testing.