Fermilab Director Profiles
Robert Kephart
IARC Project Manager/ILC Program Director
I am currently the IARC Project Manager/ILC Program Director at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. A member of the Directorate since 2006, I manage the superconducting radio frequency (SRF) technology program, a $40 million a year research and development effort in support of the proposed Project X and the International Linear Collider. I also proposed and lead the Fermilab effort to develop the Illinois Accelerator Research Center (IARC), a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the state of Illinois. In 2009, I proposed and now lead a $52.7 million DOE-funded project to build new SRF infrastructure at Fermilab.
Trained as a high energy experimentalist, I am an APS fellow and have a long career in experimental physics with more than 500 peer reviewed publications. I was a member of experiments that discovered both the bottom and top quarks, two fundamental building blocks of our universe. I have served on many national and international advisory committees in high energy physics. Between 2002 and 2005 I served as head of Fermilab’s Technical Division.
I was among the founding members of the Tevatron CDF collaboration in 1979 and served in multiple leadership roles for the collaboration, including leading the CDF top mass subgroup during the discovery of the top quark. Prior to joining CDF, I was a member of the Fermilab experimental collaboration (E-288) that discovered the upsilon resonance, which signaled the discovery of the b quark.
I received a Ph.D. in high energy physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1975. I received a B.S. in physics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1971.