Uuno Öpik (a.k.a. Uno Öpik; 19 October 1926 in Tartu, Estonia - 30 April 2005 in Bath, UK) was an Estonian-born atomic physicist most of whose adult life was spent in Northern Ireland and Great Britain.^[1] He was one of six children of Estonian astronomer and astrophysicist Ernst Öpik.^[2] His son is the British politician Lembit Öpik.^[3]

Uuno Öpik graduated from Tartu 1st Gymnasium in 1943.^[3] In 1943 his father Ernst moved the family to Danzig, and then to Swinemünde and finally to Hamburg. From 1946 to 1948 he studied at the Baltic University.^[3] In 1948 the family moved to Northern Ireland, when his father joined the staff at the Armagh Observatory.^[4] In 1950 he became a member of Student Society Liivika.^[2]

Öpik studied at Queen's University Belfast (QUB), getting a B.Sc. in mathematics in 1950, a B.Sc. in physics in 1951, and a Ph.D. in physics in 1954 with the thesis, "Quantal investigations of certain excitation and ionization processes" under the advisor David Bates.^[5]

He worked as a research fellow at the University of Bristol from 1955 to 1956, as a lecturer at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales from 1956 to 1986 and at the University of Reading from 1960 to 1962. In 1962, he returned to QUB, where he served on the staff until retirement in 1986.^[1] His doctoral students included Raymond Flannery and Hugh Morrison.^[5]

Öpik was mainly interested in atomic physics and published over 20 scientific papers in that field.

• 1967 The polarization of a closed-shell core of an atomic system by an outer electron I. A correction to the adiabatic approximation, Proc. Phys. Soc. 92, 566

• Uuno Öpik at the Mathematics Genealogy Project