Michael Woolfson Michael Woolfson Michael Mark Woolfson (born 9 January 1927) is a British physicist and planetary scientist. His research interests lie in the fields of x-ray crystallography, biophysics and the formation of stars and planets. He was educated at Jesus College, Oxford and received his PhD from UMIST. He was a research assistant at UMIST 1950-52 and at Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, 1952-54. He was an ICI Fellow, University of Cambridge, 1954-55. At UMIST he was a lecturer, 1955–61, and a Reader, 1961-65. He was Professor of Theoretical Physics, 1965-94 University of York and head of the Department of Physics,
The Racah Institute of Physics Rakavy. Two of Racah's students, Amos de-Shalit and Igal Talmi, became the world leaders in theoretical nuclear spectroscopy. They founded the nuclear physics department at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth. As mentioned, experimental physics was carried out from the late 1920s, first by Sambursky in atomic spectroscopy then by Alexander and Wolfson in X-ray spectroscopy, crystallography and optics. In 1950 William Low (Ze'ev Lev), who was a student of Charles Townes in the United States, joined the experimental physics. He started new fields of research in Jerusalem. Starting to work on microwaves, he then set up a laboratory for magnetic