New BNL director

After several months as interim head of Brookhaven National Laboratory, Samuel Aronson has been named its director, succeeding Praveen Chaudhari, who stepped down from the post in April.

Aronson takes the helm following an uncertain period at the lab. Earlier this year, BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider faced a shutdown due to a funding shortfall, but was rescued by a cash infusion from Wall Street investor Jim Simons. Future operating funds for RHIC will be made available to BNL, a US Department of Energy lab, agency officials later said. (See Physics Today, April 2006, page 35 .) As director, Aronson now heads a multiprogram national lab that employs 2600 and has a $490 million annual budget and more than 4000 facility users.

Aronson, who joined BNL in 1978 with a background in nuclear and particle physics, said he expects to grow the lab’s programs in those fields. He added that during the next decade, nanoscience, nanotechnology, and materials science will be powered by BNL’s National Synchrotron Light Source and new Center for Functional Nanomaterials.

In 1991, Aronson headed BNL’s Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment (PHENIX) which investigates collisions of heavy ions and protons. He became chair of the physics department in 2001 and was appointed as BNL’s associate laboratory director for high-energy and nuclear physics in 2005, managing the lab’s largest directorate and overseeing RHIC and the physics department.

Aronson earned a PhD in physics from Princeton University in 1968.