David Brink completed his first degree in Tasmania in 1951 and submitted his Ph.D. Thesis in Oxford in May 1955. He spent a year at MIT in 1955-56 and was appointed as a Fellow of Balliol College and Lecturer in Theoretical Physics at Oxford University in 1958. He was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1981 and was awarded the Rutherford Medal by the Institute of Physics in 1982. For a number of years he was an Associate Editor of Nuclear Physics. In 1993 he moved to a chair at the University of Trento in the History of Physics. At the same time he became the Vice-Director of the European Center for Theoretical Nuclear Physics and Related Areas.

A lifelong interest in the physics of giant resonances began with a project on the radiative widths of neutron resonances. The widths were estimated by relating photon emission and absorption and assuming that the cross section for absorption of a dipole photon by an excited nuclear state would have the giant resonance form as for absorption by the ground state.

Another long term interest has been the use of semi classical methods for heavy ion reactions and nuclear structure. In the early 70s David Scott and his group in Oxford had an experimental programme on the Harwell cyclotron and found a selectivity in the population of high angular momentum states in heavy ion transfer reactions. Dr. Brink wrote a paper in 1972 on kinematical effects in heavy ion reactions which helped to explain this selectivity. This theoretical idea was developed, especially in collaboration with Hashima Hasan, Luigi Lo Monaco, Ica Stancu and Angela Bonaccorso. They invented a simple semi classical model for neutron transfer to bound states. Later Dr. Bonaccorso and Dr. Brink extended the method to calculate transfer to the continuum processes. This approach was very successful in accounting for the position and width of the peak in the breakup cross section. Other applications of semi classical methods have been to the ALAS phenomenon in alpha scattering with Noboru Takigawa and to path-integral methods with Dr. Sukumar.

For several years from 1969 Dr. Brink had a very productive collaboration with Dominique Vautherin, Marcel Veneroni and their collaborators at Orsay on the use of Skyrme's effective interaction for Hartree-Fock calculations and, later, on the semi classical theory of collective motion in nuclei. In 1981 this work was extended in collaboration with Massimo Di Toro into a study of the dynamics of a semi classical Hartree-Fock fluid and then, with Alberto Dellafiore, into an investigation of the Vlasov equation which is the classical analogue of the Hartree-Fock method. In another direction Renzo Leonardi, Sandro Stringari and David Brink found interesting results by using sum rules with Skyrme's interaction.

Dr. Brink has always had an interest in nuclear structure problems. His first paper was on applications of the shell model to nuclei near the 208Pb magic number. He has studied alpha clustering in nuclei especially in association with several Japanese groups. Most recently he has written a book with Ricardo Broglia on the pairing interaction and nuclear superfluidity.