Raymond Davis, Jr. was an American chemist, physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate. He was born on October 14, 1914 in Washington, D.C., United States. He graduated in chemistry from the University of Maryland in 1938. He also received a master's degree from that school and a Ph.D. from Yale University in physical chemistry in 1942. Dr. Davis worked at Brookhaven until retiring in 1985. He then joined the University of Pennsylvania as a research professor and continued work at Homestake. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Davis has won numerous scientific awards, including the 1978 Cyrus B. Comstock Prize from the National Academy of Sciences; the 1988 Tom W. Bonner Prize from the American Physical Society; the 1992 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize, also from APS; the 1999 Bruno Pontecorvo Prize from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia; the 2000 Wolf Prize in Physics, which he shared with Masatoshi Koshiba, University of Tokyo, Japan; and the 2002 National Medal of Science. He died on May 31, 2006 in Blue Point, Brookhaven, New York, United States.