Two prominent physicists, Cornell University alumni Helen T. Edwards and her husband, Donald A. Edwards, have endowed a chair in accelerator physics at Cornell. The chair is being named for Boyce D. McDaniel, who is professor emeritus of physics at Cornell following a notable career of leadership in accelerator physics.

"The establishment of this chair is remarkable, since it is among the first accelerator physics chairs in the world, and it is the only one which is privately endowed," says Maury Tigner, director of the Floyd R. Newman Laboratory of Nuclear Studies (LNS) at Cornell.

The first holder of the Boyce McDaniel chair is David L. Rubin, professor of physics and director of accelerator physics at the LNS. The donors asked that the new professorship be awarded to a faculty member in the Cornell 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.

At a reception held at Cornell to honor the Edwards, McDaniel and Rubin, Cornell President Hunter Rawlings said that the Edwards "know firsthand how important accelerators have become – not only for nuclear and particle physics, but for a wide range of other sciences. Through the establishment of the McDaniel professorship they have ensured that Cornell will remain a leader in particle-beam physics -- and in the training of accelerator physicists – for many years to come."

Helen Edwards is a 1957 graduate of Cornell, where she also earned her Ph.D. in physics in 1966. She conducts research at Fermilab and the Deutches Electronen Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany. She played a prominent role in the construction of the Tevatron at Fermilab and has been the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. 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. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1961.

McDaniel, for whom they named the professorship, is a previous director of the LNS and 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., returned at the end of the war to complete his Ph.D. and joined the 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 LNS from 1967 to 1985, leading the laboratory through the completion of its 10 GeV synchrotron and the design and construction of the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) and the CLEO detector.

McDaniel 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, in addition to his notable contributions to the accelerator and elementary particle physics programs at Cornell.

Rubin was recruited by Cornell immediately after receiving 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 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, according to Tigner.

"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 says. "He has also been a very effective teacher and mentor in the field of elementary particle physics and an active, reliable faculty citizen in both the Department of Physics and the College of Arts and Sciences."