Fermilab

Contact Us

For research assistance please contact the Archivist at vhiggins@fnal.gov or 630-840-2543. You may also submit an Archives Request online.

Meet the Fermilab Archivist

Valerie Higgins, archivist

Valerie J. Higgins (vhiggins@fnal.gov) received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a minor in History from Illinois Wesleyan University in 2008. She received her MLS with a specialization in Archives and Records Management from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2010. She has worked as Project Archivist at Indiana University's Lilly Library and Assistant Archivist at the Ryerson and Burnham Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago. Higgins became Fermilab Archivist and Historian in 2012.


Fermilab Archivist Emeritus

Adrienne Kolb, archivist

Adrienne W. Kolb received her Bachelor of Arts degree in History from the University of New Orleans in 1972. She volunteered at the Los Alamos County Historical Museum in New Mexico before becoming Fermilab's Archivist in 1983. She became Fermilab Archivist and Historian in 2011. She is the author or co-author of numerous publications on the history of Fermilab and the cancelled Superconducting Super Collider. Kolb has also made presentations on the history of these laboratories in sessions of the American Physical Society and the History of Science Society. She retired in 2015.

Some of her most significant publications include:

  • "The Mirage of the World Accelerator for World Peace and the Origins of the SSC, 1953-1983," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 24/1 (1993), pp. 101-124 (with Lillian Hoddeson)
  • "A New Frontier in the Chicago Suburbs: Settling Fermilab, 1963-72," Illinois Historical Journal, 88/1 (1995), pp. 2-18 (with Lillian Hoddeson)
  • "Building Fermilab: A User's Paradise" in 1992 for The Rise of the Standard Model (Cambridge, 1997) (with Robert R. Wilson)
  • "The Superconducting Super Collider's Frontier Outpost, 1983-1988," Minerva 38 (2000), 271-310 (with Lillian Hoddeson)
  • "Vision to Reality: From Robert R. Wilson's Frontier to Leon M. Lederman's Fermilab," Perspectives in Physics Vol. 5, no. 1 (2003), pp. 67-86 (with Lillian Hoddeson)
  • Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience (Chicago, 2008) (with Lillian Hoddeson and Catherine Westfall)
  • Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider (Chicago, 2015) (with Lillian Hoddeson and Michael Riordan)