The New Zealand born physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford (left) with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Their work greatly contributed to improve the understanding of the atomic structure. Rutherford (1871-1937) may be considered the father of nuclear physics for his studies on radioactive decay. In 1908 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Bohr (1885-1962) used and developed the new concepts of the quantum theory to elaborate a new atomic model in which electrons are found at discrete levels of energies and angular momentums. He received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1922.