Nicholas P. Samios

Nicholas P. Samios (born March 15, 1932, in NYC) is an American physicist and former director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York.^[1]

Biography

He majored in physics at Columbia College of Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1953; he earned his PhD at Columbia in 1957. He worked on the Columbia faculty for three years before joining Brookhaven's physics department, where he was appointed laboratory director in May 1982.^[2] A major achievement of his tenure was the construction of the RHIC, the first heavy-ion collider.^[3] He stepped down as director in 1997 after a dispute on leaked radioactivity in the laboratory, but continued to work as a researcher.^[4] In 2003 he became director of the RIKEN BNL Research Center.^[1]

Scientific achievements

Samios has specialized in the physics of high-energy particles. He is especially known for his study of elementary particles, in particular for the discovery of the Omega minus particle in 1964 as postulated by Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman, as well as the first charmed baryon.^[3] These discoveries have contributed to the understanding of the spectrum of particles and have carried to the formulation of Quantum Chromodynamics and the Standard Model of particle physics.^[5]

Awards

• 1980 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award^[6]
• 1982 Member of the National Academy of Sciences^[1]
• 1993 Panofsky Prize^[7]
• 2009 Gian Carlo Wick Gold Medal^[7]