Samuel Aronson Named as AAAS Fellow
October 27, 2005
UPTON, NY - Samuel Aronson, Associate Laboratory Director for High Energy and Nuclear Physics at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been awarded the distinction of Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The award will be presented at the 2006 AAAS Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 18.
The honor of being named a Fellow recognizes individual AAAS members for their "efforts toward advancing science or fostering applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished." This year, 376 members were elevated to the rank of Fellow.
Aronson was cited for his "leadership in the science and management of experimental particle physics, especially heavy ion physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory." In his position, he is responsible for overseeing a $190-million annual budget and about 750 employees. The High Energy and Nuclear Physics directorate encompasses the Collider-Accelerator Department, the Physics Department, the Superconducting Magnet Division, the Instrumentation Division, and the Center for Accelerator Physics.
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. Another large project includes 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.
"It's an honor to be recognized by the AAAS. Nuclear and particle physics have had a long and productive tradition at the Laboratory. A remarkable group of staff and users in the international scientific community have produced many important discoveries over the years," Aronson said.
Founded in 1848, AAAS represents the world's largest federation of scientists and works to advance science for human well-being through its projects, programs, and publications. With more than 138,000 members and 275 affiliated societies, AAAS conducts many programs in the areas of science policy, science education, and international scientific cooperation. AAAS publishes the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science. The tradition of naming AAAS Fellows began in 1874.
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.
2005-10389 | INT/EXT | Newsroom
