Last modified: Friday, August 30, 2013
IU physicist S.Y. Lee receives lifetime achievement award for particle accelerator work
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Aug. 30, 2013
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The U.S. Particle Accelerator School will present S.Y. Lee with its USPAS Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Accelerator Physics and Technology. Lee, professor in the Department of Physics at Indiana University Bloomington, will receive the award at the 2013 North American Particle Accelerator Conference held Sept. 29 to Oct. 4 in Pasadena, Calif.
The U.S. Particle Accelerator School is a national consortium at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. The USPAS Prize honors outstanding achievements in several categories including the quality of the individual's work and its importance to the field; leadership and vision in machine building; and the teaching, encouragement and stimulation of young scientists.
Two USPAS achievement prizes are awarded every two years. This year, an additional special Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Lee "for his extraordinary contributions to accelerator education including mentoring a large cadre of highly regarded students, for overseeing the IU-USPAS Master's Degree Program in Accelerator Physics, and for serving as USPAS Director from 1998 to 2002."
Lee joined the IU Bloomington Department of Physics in 1990, after working at the Max Planck Institute, SUNY Stony Brook and the Brookhaven National Laboratory, among other appointments. Lee is the author or co-editor of five books and more than 125 journal articles.
"Professor Lee's Lifetime Achievement Prize is extremely well deserved," said Robert De Ruyter, professor of physics and chair of the Department of Physics. "He has been very prolific, both in his scientific achievements and in education, including the mentoring of graduate students. It is probably fair to say that a quarter to a third of the present generation of accelerator physicists in the United States at national laboratories and elsewhere were trained by him."
One of Lee's most important contributions to accelerator physics was his design for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He has continued to develop new and original ideas, for example in the IU Cyclotron Facility's Cooler Ring, most recently in designing a system for achieving very high beam intensities in the ALPHA electron storage ring, which is presently under construction at IU's Center for Exploration of Energy and Matter.
For more information contact Steve Chaplin, IU Communications, at 812-856-1896 or stjchap@iu.edu.
