Tom Tombrello (1936–2014) was a Robert H. Goddard Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology.
He studied nuclear reactions in the 1960s, which helped show how chemical elements are created.
[1] He chaired the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at Caltech from 1998 to 2008.
He helped create Physics 11, a freshman physics course and research fellowship that required students to audition by solving a pair of challenging toy research problems called "hurdles".
On May 30, 1997, Tombrello received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Science and Technology at Uppsala University, Sweden[2] In 2010, Tombrello became a founding Trustee of the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences.