Sally Dawson Named Chair of Brookhaven Lab's Physics Department
August 19, 2005
UPTON, NY - Sally Dawson has been named chair of the Physics Department at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, effective July 1. She succeeds Samuel Aronson, who was promoted to Associate Laboratory Director for High Energy and Nuclear Physics.
Brookhaven's Physics Department has a staff of about 260 and an annual budget of nearly $60 million for high-energy and nuclear physics research, mainly funded by DOE. The department's research focuses on investigating the structure and behavior of subatomic particles. The department also manages Brookhaven's Accelerator Test Facility, where researchers from national labs, universities, and industry carry out R&D on advanced accelerator physics, developing new radiation sources, and related subjects.
"I am honored to be the first woman chair for the Physics Department," said Dawson. On her plans for the department, she commented, "This is a challenging time for nuclear and particle physicists, and we have to plan our science explorations carefully. We have to accomplish our scientific goals within a limited budget."
The Physics Department operates three of the four major experiments at Brookhaven's world-class accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). Recently, RHIC physicists discovered a new state of matter dubbed the "perfect liquid" made from quarks and gluons, the basic building blocks of matter - a surprise discovery, since theory predicted that RHIC would create a gas of free quarks and gluons.
Nuclear physicists in the Physics Department are also helping to drive a Lab-wide initiative to upgrade RHIC to RHIC II - which would increase the collider's rate of particle interactions tenfold - and to add an electron ring to RHIC to create a machine called eRHIC for colliding electrons with protons. These upgrades along with refined detector technology will help RHIC physicists gain a better understanding of the substructure of the newly discovered state of matter at the facility.
In addition, physicists from Brookhaven's Physics Department have recently completed the design and construction of ATLAS, a detector for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. With this detector, they are preparing to search for new subatomic particles at the 14-trillion electron-volt accelerator, which is due to begin operating in 2007. Major computing facilities at Brookhaven will enable U.S. scientists to perform the calculations for LHC experiments.
After earning a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from Duke University in 1977, Dawson earned a master's degree and doctorate, both in physics, from Harvard University in 1978 and 1981, respectively. She began her career as a research associate at DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 1981, and, two years later, she moved to DOE's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, where she stayed until joining Brookhaven Lab in 1986 as an assistant physicist. Dawson rose through the ranks to become a senior physicist in 1994, and she was group leader of the high-energy theory group from 1998 to 2004. She became acting chair of the Physics Department in January 2005, a position she held until she was appointed chair. Since 2001, Dawson has also been an adjunct professor at the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University.
A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Dawson has 134 peer-reviewed publications to her name, has presented numerous scientific talks throughout the world, and has served on many national and international committees. She was chair of the American Physical Society's Division of Particle Physics in 2004, was associate editor of the physics journal Physics Review D from 1995 to 2004, and, since 2004, has been vice chair of the National Research Council's EPP2010 review of particle physics. In 1995, she was honored by the Town of Brookhaven as woman of the year in science.
2005-10358 | INT/EXT | Newsroom
