Fermilab Director Profiles
Piermaria Oddone
Director, Fermilab
I was appointed Director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory July, 2005. Previously, I served as Deputy Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with primary responsibility for the scientific development of the laboratory and its representation to the agencies. My tenure includes gaining the National Energy Super Computer Center (NERSC), launching and developing the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), breaking ground on the Molecular Foundry (the LBNL nano sciences center), establishing major new programs in quantitative biology, astrophysics and computer science and exploiting the Advanced Light Source (ALS).
My research has been in experimental particle physics and based primarily on electron-positron colliders at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). I invented the Asymmetric B-Factory, a new kind of elementary particle collider to study the differences between matter and antimatter, worked in the development of the PEP II Asymmetric B-Factory at SLAC (a second one was built in Tsukuba, Japan) and the formation of the large international collaboration, BaBar, to exploit its physics opportunities.
In 2005, I received the Panofsky Award of the American Physical Society for the invention of the Asymmetric B-Factory. I am a Fellow of the American Physical Society. I was elected as Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2008 and served as a member of the Executive Council of the National Laboratory Directors Council (NLDC). While in Perú I received a doctoral degree honoris causa from the Universidad Ricardo Palma, received a medal as the Embajador Científico y Tecnológico del Peru 2010 from the Red Internacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, and was made a foreign member of the Academia Nacional de Ciencias. I was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences in May 2011.
I was born in Arequipa, Peru, and am a U.S. citizen. After receiving my undergraduate degree from MIT, I received my Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Caltech. I joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1972.