Interactions News Wire #67-05
19 August 2005  http://www.interactions.org
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Source: Brookhaven National Laboratory
Content: Press Release
Date Issued: 19 August 2005
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The following news release is being issued today by the U.S. Department of
Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. The release (with a photo) is
also available online at:
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=05-81

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NEWS RELEASE
Number: 05-81
For release: August 19, 2005
Contact: Karen McNulty Walsh, kmcnulty@bnl.gov, (631) 344-8350 or Mona S.
Rowe, mrowe@bnl.gov, (631) 344-5056

Sally Dawson Named Chair of Brookhaven Lab's Physics Department

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.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the
Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven
National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and
environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national
security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific
facilities available to university, industry and government researchers.
Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by
Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by
Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory
facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology
organization.