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news release:
Sally Dawson Named Chair of Brookhaven Lab’s
Physics Department
Upton, NY, Aug. 19: 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.
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