Robert F. Christy (born 1916) is an American theoretical physicist

and later astrophysicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. He is

a Professor Emeritus at Caltech.

Christy was born in Vancouver, British Columbia and attended the

University of British Columbia in the 1930s, where he studied

mathematics and physics. He then entered the PhD program at UC

Berkeley under Robert Oppenheimer where he found himself in the

middle of the most active program in nuclear and theoretical

physics. He obtained his PhD in 1941 and after a few months at the

Illinois Institute of Technology he joined the Manhattan Project at

the University of Chicago working on the first chain reaction. He

then joined the joined the project at Los Alamos in the spring of

1943 and worked on the first implosion bomb.

After a few months at the University of Chicago he joined the

faculty at Caltech  in 1946 and remained there until retirement in

1986. Christy was awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal

Astronomical Society in 1967. In 1968 he became Provost and then

Acting President.

He worked in cosmic rays, elementary particles, nuclear physics, and

astrophysics.