Leon Lederman Named Next Fermilab Director
Director-Designate L. Lederman (R) with Acting Director P. V. Livdahl.
Appointment of Professor Leon M. Lederman of Columbia University as the next director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory was announced jointly on October 19, 1978 by Norman F. Ramsey, president of Universities Research Association, Inc., and John M. Deutch, Director of Energy Research, U.S. Department of Energy.
URA, a corporation formed by 53 universities in the United States and Canada, operates Fermilab for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Because of previous commitments at Columbia University, Dr. Lederman will not take office full time until June 1, 1979. He will serve as Director Designate and intends to take an active role in all major policy questions in the intervening months.
Dr. Lederman is internationally known in high energy physics. He has been associated with Columbia University as a student and faculty member for more than 25 years. He was the Higgins Professor of Physics at Columbia and was director of Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, New York which is the Columbia physics department center for experimental research in high energy physics. With colleagues and students from Nevis, he led an intensive and wide-ranging series of experiments which have provided major advancement in the understanding of weak interactions.
Dr. Lederman participated in many of the most important discoveries in particle physics, including the first observation of the non-conservation of parity in muon decay and the demonstration of the existence of two different kinds of neutrinos.
In 1977, he led the team of experimenters which discovered the Upsilon particle at Fermilab, indicating the existence of one and possibly two new quarks as constituents of the fundamental structure of matter.
Dr. Lederman, a native of New York City, received a B. A. from City College in 1943. Columbia awarded him his M.A. in 1948 and a Ph.D in 1951. He was appointed full professor in 1958 and was director of the Nevis Laboratories from 1968-1979. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1965. He has served in numerous professional organizations and in an advisory capacity to government committees.
Philip V. Livdahl continued to serving as Acting Director until June 1, 1979. He was appointed to that post on July 17, 1978.
Robert R. Wllson who served as Director of Fermilab from the time of its inception, continued to participate actively in Fermilab on a joint appointment with the University of Chicago where he held the Peter B. Ritzma Professorship in the College. He continued to work on the design and construction of the Energy Doubler/Saver (also known as the "Tevatron"), a superconducting device first proposed by Dr. Wilson that saved electrical energy and made possible external target experiments up to 1,000 GeV (I TeV), as well as colliding beam experiments up to 2 TeV. These new devices opened new vistas for research at Fermilab.