Samuel Aronson earned an A.B. in physics from Columbia
University in 1964, and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton
University in 1968. From 1968 to 1977, he held research and
academic positions at the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi
Institute for Nuclear Studies and the University of Wisconsin. His
research career has focused on experimental elementary particle
physics and nuclear physics.
Aronson joined Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in 1978.
He was appointed deputy chair of the Physics Department in
1988. From 1991 to 2001, Aronson served as the director of the
PHENIX detector project during the construction of the
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, before becoming chair of Physics
in 2001. He became Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear
and Particle Physics in 2005 and Laboratory Director and
President of Brookhaven Science Associates in 2006. He served
as Director until December 2012.
Aronson is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a
member and past Chair of the DOE National Laboratory Directors
Council. He has served as a member of the NYS Governor’s
Industry-Higher Education Task Force and on national review
boards in Canada, Sweden and Germany. He served as a board
member of the Stony Brook Foundation, the Long Island
Association, Accelerate Long Island, the New York State Smart
Grid Consortium, the Stony Brook University Advanced Energy
Research and Technology Center, the Long Island High
Technology Incubator, the Clean Energy Business Incubator
Program and the Governor’s Regional Economic Development
Council for Long Island. In 2012 he was inducted into the Long
Island Technology Hall of Fame and named Lab Director of the
Year by the Federal Laboratory Consortium. In July 2012 he was
elected to the presidential of the American Physical Society
(APS).
Aronson is currently Past President of APS and Director of the
RIKEN BNL Research Center (RBRC), which is funded by RIKEN in
Japan and hosted and operated at BNL. RBRC is devoted to
research in Nuclear Physics, High Performance Computing and
Cosmology.