Helen Edwards

Born on 27 May 1936 in Detroit, Helen Edwards was a leading accelerator scientist and a key architect of the Tevatron at Fermilab. She earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Cornell University. In 1969 she joined Fermilab, the particle physics national laboratory outside Chicago. After working on several particle accelerators, she started planning a big one: the Tevatron . Edwards served as co-leader for the construction of the 4-mile-around circular accelerator, which was completed in 1983. Unlike its predecessors, the Tevatron had superconducting magnets to accelerate protons and antiprotons to tremendous energies. The machine, which ran until 2011, allowed physicists to discover the top quark and to acquire crucial clues as to the properties of the Higgs boson. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, which supplanted the Tevatron as the world’s highest-energy accelerator, found the Higgs in 2012. Edwards received many awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Medal of Technology. She died in 2016 at age 80. [Photo credits: Fermilab (above); Reidar Hahn (below)]

Editor’s note: This post has been updated.

Date in History: 27 May 1936