Samuel Aronson Named Associate Laboratory Director for High Energy and Nuclear Physics at Brookhaven Lab
April 13, 2005
UPTON, NY - Samuel Aronson, Physics Department chair at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been named the Associate Laboratory Director for High Energy and Nuclear Physics, effective April 1. He succeeds Thomas Kirk, who has become a Special Assistant to the Director.
In his new position, Aronson is responsible for overseeing a $190-million annual budget and about 750 employees. The directorate encompasses the Collider-Accelerator Department, the Physics Department, the Center for Accelerator Physics, the Instrumentation Division, and the Superconducting Magnet Division.
"The High Energy and Nuclear Physics Directorate has had a long and productive tradition at the Laboratory, with many important discoveries and the attendant recognition of its staff and users in the international scientific community," Aronson said. "It's an honor and a big responsibility to be charged with the stewardship of this important activity."
The operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is currently the biggest project in the directorate. About 1,000 scientists from around the world perform research at the collider in an attempt to recreate the extreme hot, dense conditions thought to have existed just after the beginning of the Universe. Other large projects include the management of the U.S. participation in building the ATLAS detector, one of the two principal experiments at the Large Hadron Collider now under construction at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics; and participation in the Rare Symmetry Violating Processes experiment, research in which international collaborators investigate some of the most fundamental processes of particle physics.
Aronson faces some difficult challenges in maintaining the high caliber of Brookhaven's physics program. He said, "We're seeing some of the worst budgets and budget forecasts in a very long time. The challenge is to maintain and advance a compelling science program at Brookhaven Lab in the face of these decreased budgets."
Samuel Aronson earned an A.B. in physics from Columbia University in 1964, and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1968. From 1968 to 1972, he worked at the University of Chicago's Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies as a research associate. He then moved to the University of Wisconsin, where he was a faculty member until 1977.
Aronson joined Brookhaven Lab's Accelerator Department in 1978 as an associate physicist, and was named physicist in 1979. He joined the Physics Department in 1982, was appointed associate chair of the department in 1987 and deputy chair in 1988. In 1991, Aronson relinquished this position and, as a senior physicist, served as the head of the PHENIX detector project during the construction of RHIC, a challenge he successfully completed before he became chair of the Physics Department in 2001. Aronson is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
NOTE TO LOCAL EDITORS: Samuel Aronson is a resident of Poquott, NY.
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