Sol M. Gruner, a Princeton University physicist, has been appointed director of the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) at Cornell University, effective Sept. 1.

Gruner, on the Princeton faculty since 1978, also will be a professor of physics at Cornell. He replaces Boris W. Batterman, the Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of Engineering and professor of applied and engineering physics, as CHESS director. Batterman has been director since 1978.

"I am absolutely ecstatic about attracting Sol Gruner to CHESS," said Norman R. Scott, Cornell vice president for research and advanced studies. "He brings rich experience and enthusiasm and a drive to extend the facility's capabilities into even more areas. His understanding of instrumentation and expertise in biology, physics and materials science will help keep CHESS the premier facility for users around the world."

Gruner already is a CHESS collaborator, having been associated with the facility since about 1990. He has developed imaging detectors for protein crystallography and for integration of these detectors into the CHESS beam lines. He also has been a user of the facility for research ranging from the effects of pressure on proteins to experiments on liquid crystals, biomembranes and soft matter.

"It is an honor to be joining Cornell, which has a long and illustrious tradition in physics," Gruner said. "I am especially pleased to come to CHESS, where interdisciplinary science and graduate education combine to produce world-class research results. It is a superb facility with a first-rate staff, for which Bob Batterman should be commended. I am grateful for the opportunity to see it into the next century. I am confident that questions we investigate at CHESS in biology, physics, chemistry and materials science will benefit society and our understanding of the natural world."

Gruner earned an undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1972) and a doctorate from Princeton University (1977), both in physics. He entered Princeton as a graduate student in 1972 and joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1978 shortly after receiving his Ph.D. He was promoted to associate professor in 1985 and full professor in 1991. He has been a visiting scientist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara (1989, 1994) and at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (1994-95).

CHESS is a national facility that produces high-intensity, high-energy X-ray beams for scientific research. Established in 1978, CHESS is supported by the National Science Foundation and provides a multifaceted research and development program for scientists across the materials and biological sciences disciplines. Each year, 400 to 500 scientists and training scientists perform experiments at CHESS.

The X-ray detectors developed by Gruner's Princeton group have been especially important in aiding the MacCHESS program. MacCHESS is the Macromolecular Diffraction Facility at CHESS, a National Institutes of Health-supported program at Cornell for research in drug design, protein and virus crystallography and data collection from synchrotron sources. Its director is Steven Ealick, professor and chair of the department of biochemistry, molecular and cell biology. Gruner and Ealick have collaborated on several protein crystallographic projects.