Rate My Professor Alexander Leicester McAulay

Professor Alexander Leicester McAulay (1895–1969) was a physicist at the University of Tasmania. He earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Tasmania in 1916, a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Cambridge in 1921, a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Manchester in 1921, and a Master of Arts from Cambridge in 1926. He served as a lecturer in physics at the University of Tasmania from 1922 to 1927 and was appointed Foundation Professor of Physics in 1927, a position he held until his retirement in 1959. During the Second World War, McAulay established an optical industry in Hobart in collaboration with E. N. Waterworth, producing precision lenses and prisms for military equipment and developing a new method of lens design as leader of the university’s Optical Munitions team.

McAulay’s research encompassed cosmic radiation, particle physics, metal surface electrochemistry, optical design, and biophysics. He encouraged the establishment of experimental stations in Antarctica, Macquarie Island, New Guinea, and Tasmania. The physics department expanded significantly under his leadership and became one of the most active in Australia. He was a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, London. McAulay was known for his informal teaching style and broad interests in the concepts of time, space, relativity, and the uncertainty principle. He died on 10 April 1969 at Sandy Bay, Hobart.