The awards are generally made at APS User Meetings, which are held every spring. A call for nominations is sent out four months before the meeting, and the winner is notified at least two months in advance and invited to give an award lecture at the meeting. Awards are not necessarily made each year.

Compton was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1927 for discovering and explaining changes in x-ray wavelengths resulting from x-ray collisions with electrons, the so-called Compton effect. This important discovery in 1922 confirmed the dual nature (wave and particle) of electromagnetic radiation. A Ph.D. from Princeton University, Compton held many prominent positions including professor of physics at The University of Chicago and chairman of the committee of the National Academy of Sciences that studied the military potential of atomic energy. His position on that committee made Compton instrumental in initiating the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb.

Arthur H. Compton Awards