Julius Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was a Jewish-American theoretical physicist. Commonly called the “father of the atomic bomb,” Oppenheimer is best known for being the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the secretive Manhattan Project of World War II. He also performed much research in the fields of quantum mechanics and nuclear physics. After the use of atomic bombs near the end of the war, Oppenheimer opposed further research into larger and more powerful bombs. Eventually his security clearance was revoked by the U.S. government in 1954; he was granted political rehabilitation by the government in 1963 by being given the Enrico Fermi Award. He died of throat cancer in 1967.
