User:Kathryn EB/Neil Tanner

Neil William Tanner was an Australian physicist and fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. Noted for his work on sub-atomic particles, especially the study of neutrinos, he was also the most prominent designer of the so-called ‘Tanner Scheme’ which, between 1965-1985 brought approximately 500 undergraduates to study all subjects at Hertford College from schools without a tradition of sending pupils to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This early example of a successful university access scheme was responsible for changing attitudes and procedures in Oxford, leading to the reforms of the Dover Committee, introduced in 1986, which form the basis of university admission to Oxford to this day.

Background and education

Born in Melbourne in 1930, Neil Tanner grew up in straitened circumstances in South Yarrow, a district of the city. His father had fought in the First World War, was wounded, and died when Neil was a teenager. As his nephew, Lindsay Tanner, a member of the Australian Liberal Party and former minister of finance has put it, ‘His achievement in rising from an inner Melbourne lower middle class background to Oxford don in an era when few Australian kids went to university, much less to Oxford, is truly extraordinary.’

He graduated in Physics from Melbourne University in 1953 and with the award of an overseas scholarship by the Commission of the 1851 (Great) Exhibition he joined the nuclear structure group in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge as a doctoral student, working there on the production of carbon-12 in stars. A post-doctoral fellowship followed at the California Institute of Technology after which he returned to England to a research position in the newly established Department of Nuclear Physics under Denys Wilkinson at Oxford. Appointment to a teaching fellowship at Hertford College, Oxford from October 1960 followed.

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