director

Officials of Universities Research Association, the consortium of universities that operates the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, today (November 19) announced the appointment of Piermaria Oddone as Fermilab’s fifth director.

Robert Rathbun Wilson, a Wyoming cowboy who built the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator laboratory with the eye of an artist, the shrewdness of a banker and the conscience of a human rights activist, died late Sunday night at a retirement home in Ithaca, New York, near Cornell University. He was 85.

Universities Research Association, Inc., which operates the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has named Michael Witherell, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a distinguished career in experimental particle physics, to succeed Fermilab Director John Peoples, Jr., on July 1.