DoctorJohn Campbell

John Campbell is a retired physicist at the University of Canterbury. He is the author of Rutherford Scientist Supreme, Rutherford’s Ancestors, and www.rutherford.org.nz; the organiser of the Rutherford Origin in Nelson; the Rutherford/Pickering/Havelock Memorial at Havelock; and co-producer of the 3-hour documentary Rutherford which was based on his book.

He holds several awards for communicating science to the public, including the 1990 Commemorative Medal of the New Zealand government, a Bronze Rutherford Medal (1994) from the Royal Society of New Zealand, and a Canadian Nuclear Achievement Award for the Rutherford documentary (2012). He helped design, and supplied the illustrations for, the 1992 Rutherford banknote, in 1978 he initiated and was first editor of the New Zealand Physicist, and was awarded the Rutherford Trophy for Demonstrations in Physics by the New Zealand Institute of Physics in 2018, a competition and trophy he initiated for schoolteachers in 1973.