Daniel Q. Posin
Daniel Q. Posin was an American physicist. He was born in 1909 in Russian Turkestan, close to the Caspian Sea. When he was six years old his family fled the Russian revolution, and in a journey that took three years he made it to Mongolia and finally to the United States, the final leg of the journey on a cattle boat to San Francisco. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and earning a Ph.D. in physics.
Teaching
Posin worked as a teaching assistant at Berkeley for two years, and then accepted a position teaching physics from 1937-41 in Panama. He returned to the US and taught at Montana State University and the Montana School of Mines until 1944, when he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and performed research on radar and radioactivity. At MIT he also met Albert Einstein. It was Einstein who urged him to teach ordinary people about the peaceful uses of atomic power, and that led to Posin writing the book I Have Been to the Village. Posin gave more than 3,000 lectures about nuclear power and his position on peaceful use won him six nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.In 1946 Posin became chairman of the physics department at North Dakota Agricultural College in Fargo. In 1955, Posin, along with Cecil Haver and Baldur Kristjanson, and William B. Treumann, was asked to resign by University President Frederick Hultz in what became known as "The Purge". In 1956, he took a position teaching physics at DePaul University.
From 1967 until 1996 Dr. Posin taught Astronomy, Earth Science and Physics at San Francisco State University. He often promoted humanitarian relief efforts such as Project Guatemala in 1974 during his tenure there.