Alumni Profile: B. Cameron Reed

B. Cameron Reed, PhD

Cameron Reed

BSc Physics ‘77, PhD Physics ‘84

Professor and Chair, Physics

Alma College

Alma, MI


Dr. Cameron Reed’s research on the Manhattan Project of World War II, as related in four books and several dozen technical and semi-popular articles, has stimulated renewed and deepened appreciation of the Project. In 2009, he was elected to Fellowship in the American Physical Society “for his contributions to the history of both the physics and the development of nuclear weapons in the Manhattan Project.”

He has given presentations about his work to local, national, and international audiences. He served for four years as Editor of the American Physical Society’s “Physics and Society” newsletter, and is currently Secretary-Treasurer of the Society’s Forum on the History of Physics and is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Physics at Alma College in Michigan.

Cameron’s interests have been wide-ranging: he has published papers on the properties of the intrinsically brightest stars of our home Milky Way galaxy, data analysis techniques, quantum physics, and pedagogical aspects of physics and astronomy. He also authored the undergraduate text “Quantum Mechanics” (Jones & Bartlett, 2008), which has been adopted by a number of colleges and universities across North America.

Dr. Reed credits the success of his own teaching and research career to the high-quality classes and mentoring he received from faculty members at the University of Waterloo.