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Gerald J. Wasserburg is an American geologist. He is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology. He is known for his work in the fields of isotope geochemistry, cosmochemistry, meteoritics and astrophysics.
After leaving the US army, where he received the Combat Infantryman Badge, he graduated from high school and attended college on the G.I. Bill. Wasserburg completed his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1954, with a thesis on the development of K–Ar dating, done under the sponsorship of Prof. H. C. Urey and Prof M. G. Inghram. He joined the faculty at Caltech in 1955 as Assistant Professor. He became Associate Professor in 1959 and Professor of Geology and Geophysics in 1962. In 1982 he became the John D. MacArthur Professor of Geology and Geophysics; he retired in 2001. He, Typhoon Lee and D.A. Papanastassiou discovered the presence of short-lived radioactive 26Al in the early solar system and short-lived 107Pd with William R. Kelly.
Wasserburg was deeply involved in the Apollo Program with the returned Lunar samples. He was the co-inventor of the Lunatic Spectrometer and founder of the "Lunatic Asylum" research laboratory at Caltech specializing in high precision, high sensitivity isotopic analyses of meteorites, lunar and terrestrial samples. He and his co-workers were major contributors to establishing a chronology for the Moon and proposed the hypothesis of the Late Heavy Bombardment of the whole inner solar system at near 4.0 Gy ago.
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