George Bishop was a leading nuclear physicist and science administrator. Having been the Kelvin Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, he was director of the Department of Natural and Physical Sciences at the European Commission’s Joint Research Council (NRC) at Ispra, Italy.

His main contribution to nuclear physics was his study of the structures of the nuclei of the atoms of elements with low atomic numbers (such as helium, hydrogen, lithium) by observing their responses to bombardment by gamma rays. He acquired an international reputation in quantum electrodynamics, which describes how light and matter interact.

George Robert Bishop was born in London in 1927. He was educated at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich, London, and won scholarships that enabled him to study physics at Christchurch College, Oxford. In 1948 he was took a first in Natural Science and became a research student with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), the government department responsible for research. This enabled him to work on experimental nuclear physics at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford. In 1950 he received his doctorate for a thesis entitled Precision Measurements in Nuclear Physics.

A Francophile from an early age, Bishop moved to the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, in 1955. There he led the team designing the spectrometers for an electron accelerator that was under construction. This work enabled the group to make important scientific advances. In 1964, after two years as professor at the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Paris, he became the first Kelvin Professor of Natural Philosophy and the first director of the Kelvin Laboratory, East Kilbride.

An electron accelerator was under construction at the laboratory but the associated spectrometers still had to be designed, and Bishop took on the task with his usual energy. The research using his spectrometers led to the elucidation of the structure of several nuclei.

In 1974 he left the UK once more, to be director of physical sciences at the NRC in Italy — Bishop spoke Italian fluently and liked Italy, his wife’s homeland. In 1982 he became the director-general of the NRC. As such he was mainly an administrator rather than a practising scientist, responsible for a large number of physicists, chemists and mathematicians working on a wide variety of energy technologies. He retired in 1993.

His publications include numerous papers on nuclear and high energy physics in scientific journals. His books include Beta and X-Ray Spectroscopy (1960) and Nuclear Structure and Electromagnetic Interactions (1965).

Among his many honours and awards, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1965) and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (1968). In 1979 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in science by the University of Strathclyde, and in 1992 he was appointed CBE.

Bishop’s wife, two sons and a daughter survive him.

Professor George Bishop, CBE, nuclear physicist, was born on January 16, 1927. He died on October 11, 2008, aged 81