Peter Littlewood optical fibers and devices, and new materials for particle detectors. Peter Littlewood Peter Littlewood (born 18 May 1955) is a British physicist and Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago. He was the 13th Director of Argonne National Laboratory. He previously headed the Cavendish Laboratory as well as the Theory of Condensed Matter group and the Theoretical Physics Research department at Bell Laboratories. He gained a first-class degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge in 1976, and was then awarded a Kennedy Scholarship to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for two years. He returned to
Cavendish Laboratory in 1940 by two teams working independently: Egon Bretscher and Norman Feather at the Cavendish and Edwin M. McMillan and Philip Abelson at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The Cavendish Laboratory has had an important influence on biology, mainly through the application of X-ray crystallography to the study of structures of biological molecules. Francis Crick already worked in the Medical Research Council Unit, headed by Max Perutz and housed in the Cavendish Laboratory, when James Watson came from the United States and they made a breakthrough in discovering the structure of DNA. For their work while