A Personal Look At Seven Who Hope To Bring You The SSC

Roy Schwitters, Director The National Science Foundation demonstrated its knack for spotting talent 10 years ago when it selected this experimental physicist for its prestigious Alan T. Waterman Award as the nation’s outstanding young scientist. Schwitters, then a recently named professor of physics at Harvard, was chosen for his important contributions in the design and construction of a particle detector for the Stanford Positron-Electron Accelerating Ring at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, More recently, he was codirector of a large team that designed, built, and put into operation the Central Detector Facility at Fermilab’s Tevatron. Now, at the age of 45, Schwitters has taken on his most challenging assignment. But it’s clear that he—as someone who loves his work—is suffering from divided loyalties. “I accepted this job because it’s important for science, and this country, to do this project. I’m interested in the scientific questions it’s trying to answer, and it’s a heck of an administrative challenge as well. It’s still not as interesting to me as doing basic research, but I think that it’s an important job, so I’m doing it.” Richard Briggs, Deputy Director and Project Manager A 17-year veteran of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, most recently as associate director, Briggs has been involved in two programs that have gotten him in hot water with the Department of Energy’s director of energy research Robert Hunter, and cloud his future with the laboratory. One, the lab’s rapidly growing free electron laser projeci, once put him at odds with another approach championed by Hunter’s former company, Western Research Corp., for use in the Defense Department’s Strategic Defense Initiative program. The other involves magnetic fusion energy, a 25-year effort at several national labs that Hunter has criticized repeatedly and slated for reduced funding. The 52-year-old Briggs says that the supercollider was the last thing on his mind when Schwitters asked him to come on board, but the magnitude of the project whetted his appetite. “When I first came to Livermore [after getting his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964] I thought I’d stay a few years and go into teaching. And I did that for six years, back at MIT. But I realized that I enjoyed working on big projects and that what you could do with teams of people in a big laboratory was far more than what you could do at a university with one or two graduate students.” Thomas Bush, Associate Director, Magnet Systems For much of his 27 years with the Navy as an engineering duty officer, Bush oversaw the design, development, testing, and production of the nuclear missiles for the Poseidon and Trident submarines. And it was what he learned, as he puts it, “about managing a program where you have to take complex pieces of hardware, with high-performance standards, and get them to perform successfully” that appealed to Schwitters in looking for someone to head the lab’s billion-dollar magnet program. Bush, 52, holds a doctorate in atomic physics from the Naval Postgraduate School, and has worked on nuclear weapons at Lawrence Livermore lab. But he admits that it’s not the science that gets his blood pumping when he thinks about his job. “It’s the flat-out challenge that excites me, and the people that I’ve hired to help me run this program. It’s going to be difficult, it’s going to be fun, it’s going to take everything I’ve got. It’s worth doing, and it’s not a done deal.” Helen Edwards, Associate Director, Accelerator Systems Last year’s decision by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to give her one of its so called genius awards, worth $315,000 over five years, only confirmed what others had been saying about Edwards for many years. But you’d never know it by talking to her. Asked how she joined the supercollider project, she answers that “URA needed to list somebody in its proposal to manage the lab, and they had to do it quickly. So they asked me, since they knew me, and I said okay.” The 53-year-old Edwards comes to the SSC after 20 years at Fermilab, where she held a similar position. Although it is her division that is responsible for the heart of the project—the twin, 53-mile-long accelerator—she is painfully self-effacy winter for personal reasons to return to the Bay area, where he served on the Central Design Group for three- years after spending eight years as a professor at Cornell University. But he’s certainly not going back to Berkeley to re-create an era that is over. “There’s always some tension between the old and the new,” he says about lingering hostility between that group and the new laboratory. “But things are moving so quickly here that what was spectacular work done by the Central Design Group is rapidly becoming history. Whatever ill feelings may have existed will eventually disappear in the mist of history.” -J.M.

A Personal Look At Seven Who Hope To Bring You The SSC

The Scientist Staff

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