Robert William Ditchburn (14 January 1903 – 8 April 1987) was an English physicist whose career started as Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin (1929-1946), and ended at the University of Reading, where he worked hard to build up the physics department.
He then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, earning BA (1924) and a PhD (1928) for research done under J. J. Thomson at the Cavendish Laboratory.
[2] He successfully competed for a Fellowship at TCD in 1928, and the following year moved to Ireland to become Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy.
[1][4] Apart from a few years back in England at the Admiralty Research Laboratory in Teddington during WWII, he remained in Dublin until 1946.
[5] His own research included work on photoionization, the optical properties of solids and the effects of eye movements on visual perception, in particular methods for stabilizing retinal images.