Named Professorship

David L. Rubin, professor of physics and director of accelerator physics in the Floyd R. Newman Laboratory of Nuclear Studies, has been elected the Boyce D. McDaniel Professor of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is the first holder of the new professorship, endowed by Helen T. Edwards '57, Ph.D. '66, and Donald A. Edwards Ph.D. '61. The election became effective Nov. 1.

Rubin was recruited by Cornell immediately after he received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan in 1983. For more than a decade he has been the leader of the large group of physicists and engineers responsible for designing and implementing upgrades of the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR). This achievement provides the backbone for a very successful program in heavy quark and lepton physics and has enabled Cornell to remain the foremost center for the training of accelerator physicists in the United States, said Maury Tigner, director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies.

"While being prominent in the world accelerator physics community during the 1990s, Rubin also has played an active role in the teaching and service activities of the Department of Physics and the College of Arts and Sciences," Tigner said. "He has also been a very effective teacher and mentor in the field of high-energy physics and an active, reliable faculty citizen in both the Department of Physics and the College of Arts and Sciences."

The donors, both prominent in high-energy physics, asked that the professorship be awarded to a faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences whose discipline is particle-beam physics and who would teach both graduate and undergraduate students in addition to doing research.

They named the professorship for McDaniel, a previous director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies who was Helen Edwards' thesis adviser. McDaniel, now retired in Ithaca, was a graduate student at Cornell who left during World War II to join the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M. He returned at the end of the war to complete his Ph.D. and joined the Cornell faculty in 1946. He became a full professor in 1956 and was named the Floyd. R. Newman Professor in Nuclear Studies in 1977. He was director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies from 1967 to 1985, leading the laboratory through the completion of its 10 GeV synchrotron and the design and construction of CESR and the CLEO detector. He enjoys an international reputation for his distinguished career in accelerator physics, including leading the commissioning of the Main Ring at Fermilab and providing advice for numerous accelerator projects throughout the country.

Helen Edwards, who has been the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, conducts research at Fermilab and the Deutches Electronen Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany and played a prominent role in the construction of the Tevatron at Fermilab. Donald Edwards, who also works at DESY, is considered a major voice in accelerator theory and was responsible for the technical design of the Cornell synchrotron.