Issue date: December 30, 1998
Jonathan Dorfan, associate director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, will step up to the top position at SLAC next year, Stanford President Gerhard Casper announced last week.
Dr. Dorfan, who according to SLAC was hand-picked by his predecessor Burton Richter, has since 1994 led SLAC's B-Factory project to pursue the question of why we live in a universe dominated by matter, rather than equal parts matter and anti-matter.
Nobel Prize laureate Burton Richter, who has directed SLAC since 1984, recently announced he is stepping down at the end of August. He will continue conducting physics research and working on science policy at Stanford, where he is the Paul Pigott Professor of Physical Sciences.
The selection of Dr. Dorfan for the top position was widely praised within the SLAC and Stanford communities. Renowned theoretical physicist Sidney Drell, SLAC's deputy director emeritus, issued a statement saying: "Jonathan has shown outstanding talents as the builder and manager of a major high-energy facility, the B-Factory.
"He does excellent science and has shown all the important capabilities of leadership. He has the vision and has thought seriously about where we should go."
Dr. Dorfan's research areas are experimental particle physics and accelerator design. He led the effort to establish the B-Factory at SLAC, the world's first particle collider in which the electrons and positrons meet at unequal energies; electrons have almost three times the energy of positrons.
Outgoing director Richter, whom Stanford President Casper praised as an "extraordinarily able, dedicated and tenacious director" of SLAC, has been a pioneer in developing the colliding-beam accelerators that now dominate high-energy physics around the world.
Dr. Richter started developing these machines at MIT, and has continued since he came to Stanford in 1956 as a young post-doctoral student. But his years as director at SLAC have required administrative, budget and political skills as well as science. "The job is to get resources for other people to do great science -- and to keep them moving in the direction you think is most productive," he said.
The series of ever-larger, ever-more sophisticated colliders at SLAC have generated three Nobel Prizes -- to Dr. Richter in 1976, to Richard Taylor in 1990, and to Martin Perl in 1995.
Established in 1962, SLAC is a world research facility with 1,200 employees on site, 2,800 visiting visiting researchers from around the world, and an annual budget of about $177 million.
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