Walter Houser Brattain Walter Houser Brattain Walter Houser Brattain (; February 10, 1902 – October 13, 1987) was an American physicist at Bell Labs who, along with fellow scientists John Bardeen and William Shockley, invented the point-contact transistor in December 1947. They shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention. Brattain devoted much of his life to research on surface states. Walter Brattain was born in Xiamen, Fujian, China, to American parents Ross R. Brattain and Ottilie Houser Brattain. Ross R. Brattain was a teacher at the Ting-Wen Institute, a private school for Chinese boys. Both parents were graduates of Whitman
Beit Memorial Fellowships for Medical Research Beit Memorial Fellowships for Medical Research Beit Memorial Fellows have been awarded a number of prestigious prizes with seven Nobel Prizes including two for Frederick Sanger (1944) and the 2012 prize for medicine for John Gurdon. Nobel laureates who have held Beit fellowships are Alexander R. Todd (chemistry, 1957), Fred Sanger (chemistry, 1958 and 1980), Macfarlane Burnet (physiology or medicine, 1960), Bernard Katz (physiology or medicine, 1970) and Tim Hunt (physiology or medicine, 2001). The first female member of the Royal Society in 1945 was Marjory Stephenson (1914 Beit fellowship) an early recipient of the fellowship. The Beit Memorial Medical