Nobel Prize Recipient. Ilya M. Frank received world-wide acclaim after being awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared jointly this award with Pavel Cherenkov and Igor Tamm. These three Russian physicists received the award, according to the Nobel Prize Committee, "for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov effect." He received two nominations for the Nobel candidacy. In 1934 Cherenkov had discovered that bluish light is emitted when gamma rays pass through water. In 1937 he and Tamm explained this phenomenon as "the emission of light waves by electrically charged particles moving faster than the speed of light in a medium." Tamm developed this theory more fully in a paper published in 1939. This became known in the scientific community as the Cherenkov Effect, yet in countries that were behind the Iron Curtain in eastern Europe, the "Cherenkov Effect" is referred to as the Vavilov-Cherenkov Effect or Cherenkov Radiation. Cherenkov, while still a doctorate student under S.I. Vavilov, made his discovery. Since Vavilov died in 1951, seven years before the 1958 Nobel Prize, he was not a candidate for the coveted award. Frank's own Nobel biography refers to the discovery as the Vavilov-Cherenkov Effect. Besides the Nobel Prize, he along with Cherenkov, Tamm, and Vavilov, were awarded State Prizes in 1946 for the Cherenkov Effect. Later, he worked on theoretical and experimental nuclear physics and the design of reactors, and from 1957 he headed the neutron laboratory at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna. He was born the youngest son of a mathematics professor, of Jewish ancestry, and a mother, who was a Russian Orthodox physician. After graduating from Moscow State University in 1930, where he was a student of Vavilov, he held a post at the Leningrad Optical Institute. Returning to Moscow in 1934, he accepted a post at the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute, staying there until 1970. From 1940, he was simultaneously a professor at Moscow State University. In 1946 he was elected a corresponding member, and in 1968 a full member, of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Science. He married a noted historian and the couple had one son. His uncle, Simon Frank, was a Russian-German philosopher. In his honor, the Frank Award is presented annually by Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, for outstanding achievements in neutron physics.