One of Cornell University's most eminent researchers, Edwin E. Salpeter, the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences emeritus, has been named the recipient of the 1999 Hans A. Bethe Prize by the American Physical Society (APS).

The $7,500 prize will be presented next March at the society's centennial meeting in Atlanta. The prize, established last year, is named for the Nobel laureate who has been a Cornell faculty member since 1935. In announcing the award, the APS cites Salpeter "for wide-ranging contributions to nuclear and atomic physics and astrophysics."

Salpeter has been a colleague of Bethe's, as well as a collaborator, for most of his professional life. He recalls that the two first met while Salpeter was a graduate student at the University of Birmingham, England, in the mid-1940s. "I knew I wanted to become a postdoc of Bethe's because his scientific temperament was what I was looking for in an adviser," he says.

In 1949 Salpeter arrived at Cornell to study under Bethe. "I was one of Hans Bethe's young men," he says.

Salpeter's research closely followed the subject areas in which Bethe himself worked: nuclear physics, astrophysics and atomic theory. In the 1950s the two men worked together on atomic theory and quantum electrodynamics, developing the Bethe-Salpeter equation and co-authoring a book on quantum mechanics.

Salpeter fled the Hitler forces in his native Austria in 1939 and settled with his family in Australia. He returned briefly to Australia in 1953 to take up an appointment at the Australian National University. He returned to Cornell as an associate professor in 1954 and was named a full professor in 1957.

Last year he was awarded the Crafoord Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his studies of chain reactions, including the "Salpeter process," which describes the energy process in older stars. In 1973 he was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.