Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre Director Burt Richter will step down on 31 August. His successor will be Jonathan Dorfan,
associate director of SLAC and head of its recently dedicated B-Factory project.
When he steps down,
Richter will have been Director for 15 years.
His career is intimately linked with that of electron colliders at Stanford the
StanfordPrinceton electron collider,
the
SPEAR and
PEP electronpositron rings and
the
SLC linear collider.
Richter came to Stanford as a post-doctoral student in 1956 after his PhD at MIT.
In 1963 he joined SLAC,
becoming Director in 1984 on the
retirement of founding director Wolfgang “Pief” Panofsky.
Richter shared the
1976 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sam Ting of MIT for their independent discoveries of the
J/psi particle.
He will remain at Stanford and
will also become President of the
International Union of Pure and
Applied Physics (IUPAP).
Dorfan,
a native of South Africa,
is a naturalized US citizen. He earned his doctorate at California-Irvine in 1976 and came to SLAC as a post-doctoral fellow,
moving up to research physicist in 1981,
associate professor in 1984,
full professor in 1989 and associate director in 1994. He led the effort to establish the B-Factory at SLAC,
including being in charge of the team that produced the machine conceptual design. He is currently technical co-ordinator for the construction of the BaBar detector at the B-Factory.
