High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Dr. William Albert Zisman (1905-1986)[1][2] was born in Albany, NY and spent his youth in Providence, RI up to the age of 14 when his family moved to Washington, DC. He earned his BS and MS degrees in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began his career working as a research assistant to Nobel Prize winner P. W. Bridgman at Harvard University. He earned his PhD while at Harvard in 1932 and continued on as a post-doc studying high pressure problems relating to the Earth's core. During this point in his career he began to follow in the footsteps of Langmuir, Rideal, and Harkins.[3] Research funds were limited during the Great Depression and so Zisman returned to Washington, DC and held various administrative jobs for government agencies that were born during the New Deal era.