José Leite Lopes (October 28, 1918 – June 12, 2006) was a Brazilian theoretical physicist who worked in the field of quantum field theory and particle physics. Life Leite Lopes began his university studies in 1935, enrolling in industrial chemistry at the Chemistry School of Pernambuco. In 1937, while presenting a paper to a scientific conference in Rio de Janeiro, the young student met Brazilian physicist Mário Schenberg and was introduced by him in São Paulo to Italian physicists Luigi Fantappiè and Gleb Wataghin. All three were working on research in physics at the then recently created University of São Paulo, amid a climate of great intellectual excitement and a breeding ground for a bright young generation of what would become the élite of Brazilian physics, such as César Lattes, Oscar Sala, Roberto Salmeron, Jayme Tiomno and Marcelo Damy de Souza Santos. Encouraged to study physics by what he saw, Leite Lopes moved to Rio de Janeiro after hist graduation in 1939. He took the entrance examinations to the National Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Brazil in 1940 and graduated a bachelor in physics in 1942. Accepting an invitation by Carlos Chagas Filho, Leite Lopes started to work in the same year the Institute of Biophysics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, but soon moved to the University of São Paulo to take up graduate studies in quantum mechanics with his teacher, friend and sponsor, Mário Schenberg. His main work during this time was on the calculation of Dirac's radiation field of electrons. In 1944, Leite Lopes got an American fellowship to study at Princeton University, in New Jersey, United States, under Josef-Maria Jauch. There, he had the opportunity to learn and work with giants of theoretical physics, such as Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli and John von Neumann, despite the fact that most of the faculty was absent, involved in the Manhattan Project (the development of the first atomic bombs). In 1946, he finished his doctoral dissertation, on the topic of the influence of the recoil of heavy particles on the nuclear potential energy, and returned to Rio de Janeiro. He accepted the interim chair of Theoretical and Superior Physics at the University of Brazil, and started to lecture on quantum mechanics and quantum theory of radiation. In 1948 he was confirmed as chairman after presenting a thesis on the theory of nuclear forces. Together with