People: Former SSC Official Assumes Key Post At National Laboratory

Thomas Kirk- Former SSC Official Assumes Key Post At National Laboratory Jerome Bert Wiesner - Obituary Date: November 14, 1994, pp.25 Thomas Kirk, the former deputy director of the now-defunct superconducting supercollider (SSC) laboratory in Waxahachie, Texas, has assumed the position of associate director for high energy and nuclear physics at the United States Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. He began his job October 3. Kirk took over the position from Melvin Schwartz, who left the laboratory to become the I.I. Rabi Professor at New York City's Columbia University. Kirk, a high-energy physicist by training, will be responsible for the physics department, the alternate gradient synchrotron (AGS) department, the instrumentation division, and the Center for Accelerator Physics at Brookhaven. Kirk says of his immediate goals for his new position, "My first job is to make sure that the programs are sustained as planned," before embarking on new ventures. Of all the programs under way at the laboratory, Kirk considers the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) program as the most important. Expected to be fully operational by 1999, RHIC will enable physicists to study heavy-ion collisions for ions as large as gold, and thus "investigate the physics of the Big Bang. We are hoping to re-create the quark-gluon plasma that existed one microsecond after the creation of the universe." Such experiments, he adds, while not proving the long- contested Big Bang theory for the origins of the universe, "would add credibility" to the theory. Kirk also places a high priority on the research programs associated with the AGS facility, used to study heavy-ion collisions of lighter particles than those examined with RHIC. Kirk, 54, received a B.S. degree in engineering physics from the University of Colorado, Denver, in 1962, and his master's and doctoral degrees in physics from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1964 and 1967, respectively. As physics department faculty member at Harvard University until 1972, he conducted research at Brookhaven and in the course of his career participated in four high-energy AGS experiments there. He has held several scientific and management positions at many of the top United States physics laboratories, including the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. He is a consultant on various projects to both the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. --Neeraja Sankaran (The Scientist, Vol:8, #22, pg.25, November 14, 1994) (Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.) Jerome Bert Wiesner, an electrical engineer who served as science adviser to President John F. Kennedy and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was also an internationally known advocate of arms control, died of heart failure on October 21 in Watertown, Mass. He was 79 years old. Wiesner, president of MIT from 1971 until 1980, began his association with the school in 1942. In that year, he joined the research staff of the newly created Radiation Laboratory, where he worked on the development of microwave radar. Subsequently, he held numerous high-level positions at the school, including director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (the successor to the Radiation Laboratory), acting head of the department of electrical engineering (now the department of electrical engineering and computer science, MIT's largest academic department), dean of the School of Science, and provost. During World War II, he was a leader in the development of radar, and within the scientific community was recognized as an authority on microwave theory, communication science and engineering, signal processing, and radio and radar. Wiesner was a frequent consultant and adviser to the government. He became a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee in 1957, during the Eisenhower administration, and in 1961 became science adviser to Kennedy while also heading the Science Advisory Committee. Later he served on the Technology Advisory Council of the Office of Technology Assessment in Congress. Among dozens of national and international awards and honors, he received the President's Certificate of Merit, the United States' second highest civilian award for outstanding service. In 1958, Wiesner became associated with Pugwash, an informal group of scientists dedicated to improving relations between intellectual leaders in Communist and Western countries. While a member of the Kennedy administration, he was a key figure in establishing the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, achieving a nuclear test-ban treaty, and in the effort to restrict the deployment of antiballistic missile systems. In addition to numerous articles on arms control and nuclear disarmament in national and international newspapers, he wrote books on arms control as well as science and politics. A native of Detroit, Wiesner attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and received his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the school in 1937, 1938, and 1950, respectively. Prior to coming to MIT, he was chief engineer for the Acoustical and Record Library of the Library of Congress.

People: Former SSC Official Assumes Key Post At National Laboratory

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of