John Robert de Laeter, AO, FTSE, FAIP (3 May 1933 – 16 August 2010) was an Australian scientist with a distinguished career across several fields in nuclear physics, cosmochemistry, geochronology, isotope geochemistry.
[2] While teaching at Bunbury High School in the late 1950s, de Laeter attended a science teachers' conference in Sydney, where he described the following: Further University studies culminated in a thesis on the isotopic composition of terrestrial and meteoritic tin and a PhD in 1966.
[2][3][5] De Laeter's scientific interests were broad, but centred on the application of mass spectrometry techniques in cosmochemistry and nuclear physics.
He is credited with refining the isotopic composition and atomic weight measurements of elements,[2] including antimony,[6] barium,[7] tin[8][9] and ytterbium.
This was noted as a very fitting tribute, because Mark Oliphant had given a lecture in 1950 that had inspired Peter M Jeffrey – John de Laeter's PhD supervisor – to begin the pioneering work in mass spectrometry and geochronology in Australia.