Edward J. Lofgren

Edward Joseph Lofgren (January 18, 1914 – September 6, 2016) was an American physicist with Swedish heritage (Löfgren, meaning "Leaf-branch" in Swedish) in the early days of nuclear physics and elementary particle research at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL).

[2][3] Lofgren graduated from UC Berkeley in May 1938, and got a summer job working on E. O. Lawrence's new 37-inch cyclotron completed in 1937, at a salary of about $0.50 an hour.

In the fall of 1940 he was hired by Lawrence to help on adapting and using the 37-inch cyclotron to separate isotopes of uranium for the atomic bomb project.

With the end of the war he returned to Berkeley to complete the final year of his degree program, then went on to the University of Minnesota as a post doctoral fellow.

[4][5][6] Not until after both men's passings, it was established that Lofgren was a 7th cousin to chemist and 1951 Nobel prize laureate Glenn T. Seaborg, also at Berkeley, who was a principal or co-discoverer of ten of the transuranium elements, and developed the actinide concept and the arrangement of the actinide series in the periodic table of the elements.