theoretical physics to his own physics instructor.
In 1922 he earned his doctorate, and after further study in Gottingen, Germany, and in Leiden, the Netherlands, he began teaching at the University of Rome. Here Fermi met Laura Capon, a science student at the university who became his wife in 1928. In 1934 Fermi worked out a theory of beta-ray disintegration in radioactivity. Soon he was experimenting with neutrons and learned to make about 40 chemical elements radioactive. For this work he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1938.
