The father of nuclear physics is a New Zealand-born physicist, Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford was born on August 30, 1871, in Spring Grove, New Zealand, and he was the son of a farmer. He was a poor boy but showed his ability in mathematics and science at an early stage of his education, and as a result, he got scholarships throughout his education. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 for his radioactivity and atomic structure work.

Rutherford's working career involved groundbreaking experiments, the first being the discovery of alpha and beta radiation at McGill University in Canada. His research would later contribute to developing the nuclear atom as a model that defines modern atomic theory. In 1911, he conducted the gold foil experiment, which discovered that atoms are almost empty, and the nucleus is tiny and dense. This groundbreaking discovery changed the perception of what constituted atoms back then.

Rutherford's other achievement in 1919 was conducting the first artificial nuclear reaction. Rutherford exposed nitrogen atoms to alpha particles and proved that changing one element into another was possible, which can be considered the foundation for atomic chemistry. Further developments during his leadership at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge were made, such as James Chadwick's discovery of the neutron in 1932.

His discoveries and contributions to science as a teacher of many future Nobel Prize winners and as a founder of the scientific world of the twentieth century are to be considered. He can be observed in the contributions of such scientists as Niels Bohr, who proposed the quantum mechanical model of the atom. Rutherford passed on in 1937, but his contributions continued to be felt through the element rutherfordium, named after him in 1997.