Robert R. Wilson

Robert Rathbun Wilson (4 March 1914 to 16 January 2000) was an American physicist known for his work on the Manhattan Project, as a sculptor, and as the architect and first director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) from 1967 to 1978. Born in Frontier, Wyoming, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and took his doctorate in 1940 under Ernest Lawrence with a thesis on the theory of the cyclotron. He worked at Princeton University on electromagnetic separation of uranium isotopes, then at the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he headed the Cyclotron Group and later the Research Division. After the war he went to Harvard, where a paper on the radiological use of fast protons founded the field of proton therapy, and then to Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies and built four electron synchrotrons. He resigned from Fermilab in 1978 in protest at inadequate government funding.