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The Michigan Alumnus 443
From the great American naval armada operating near the Bikini Atoll came the cabled acceptance two weeks ago of appointment to the Deanship of Michigan's Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies.
Ralph A. Sawyer, directing the activ ities of more than five hundred scien tists in the preparation for the atom bombing in the far Pacific, sent that cable to the Regents, accepting the preferred Deanship. He will assume his duties with the beginning of the Fall Semester, suc ceeding Dean Clarence S. Yoakum, who died last November 20. Since the Dean's death, Professor Peter Okkel berg, Assistant Dean, has taken over the duties now to be entrusted to Dr. Sawyer.
Having received an A.B. degree from Dartmouth College in 1915, Dr. Saw yer has served on the University of Michigan faculty since 1919. He had advanced to Professor of Physics in 1930. Besides graduating from Dart mouth, he attended Atkinson Academy and was a Chamberlin Fellow of Dartmouth College at the University of Chicago. For a time he also served as an assistant in physics at the Univer sity of Chicago, where he received a Ph.D. degree.
Dr. Sawyer was on active duty as an Ensign in the Naval Reserve during World War I, and in 1941 he was granted a leave from the University faculty to again serve in the Navy. He was commissioned a Lieutenant Com mander and placed in charge of experimental laboratories of the Naval Prov ing Ground at Dahlgren, Virginia. In August 1943, he was promoted to Commander and assumed charge of the testing and research laboratory at Dahlgren.
After his release from the Navy last September, Sawyer was appointed head of the Ordnance Division of the Naval Ordnance Test Station at Inyokern, California, as the Navy felt his ex perience had particularly fitted him to organize the Ordnance Division and initiate work on new weapons. He was selected for his present task last April.
Designated in 1944 by American Men of Science as one of the nation's outstanding scientists, Dr. Sawyer specializes in the fields of spectroscopy, radiometry, extreme ultraviolet spectra, series analysis of line spectra, hyper- fine structure of spectral lines, and quantitative spectrographic analysis. He is a fellow of the American Physi cal Society, the Optical Society of America (a Past Director), the Society for Applied Spectroscopy and the Research Club of the University of Michigan. He has served as associate edit or of the Journal of the Optical Society of America, held a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and received other honors. Since 1919, he has been the author of 53 technical papers dealing with the fields of his specialization.