Franz Newell Devereux Kurie (/ˈkʌri/; February 6, 1907 in Victor, Colorado – June 12, 1972) was an American physicist who, while working at Yale in 1933, showed that the neutron was neither a dumbbell-shaped combination of proton and electron, nor an onion-shaped combination of an electron embracing the proton. Consequently, and until the discovery of the quark structure of hadrons, the neutron was assumed to be an elementary particle. His Kurie plot is used in the study of beta decay.