Nicholas P. Samios

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]

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]

• 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]

• 450th Brookhaven Lecture: Nicholas Samios to Reflect on Science
• Articles by Nicholas P. Samios on Scientific American