Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM, FRS (30 August 1871 - 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics. He discovered that atoms have their positive charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model, or planetary, model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering in his gold foil experiment. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. He is widely credited as splitting the atom in 1917 and leading the first experiment to 'split the nucleus' in a controlled manner by two students under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton in 1932.