"I had never known a physicist," Oddone said during his introductory press conference on Friday. "All I knew was what I was reading in the press about people doing such fantastic things at places like the Rad Lab [now Berkeley Lab]. I decided, while not knowing what a physicist was, that I wanted to be a physicist. My mother said, 'If you want to be a physicist, you have to get out of here.' I applied to all the famous schools, and my parents put me on a boat and shipped me north to M.I.T."

Arriving at the Boston campus, Oddone was intimidated by a roommate who discoursed on differential equations. He studied night and day out of fear that he was out of his depth. At the end of the year, his roommate dropped physics and transferred to the humanities. "He said if physicists had to work that hard all the time, he didn't want to be a physicist," Oddone recalled.

The roommate remained Oddone's lifelong friend, and is now a prominent intellectual property lawyer in Boston. Oddone wasn't all work at M.I.T., however; he met his future wife, Barbara, who was a Wellesley College student. They are approaching their 40th wedding anniversary. Their daughter, Alessandra, is a senior at Wellesley majoring in Business and Spanish; their son, Gian Michele (with wife, Julie) is a postdoc in Chemical Engineering at the University of California-Davis.

Barbara S. de Oddone, a native of Berkeley, Calif., was recently named one of the top 10 labor lawyers in the San Francisco Bay area. She described the natural beauty of the Fermilab site as "astounding," and welcomed the change of moving to the Midwest.

"Many of us who come here from other places have Midwestern roots," she said. "My grandmother was born in a sod house on the Kansas prairie. But when we went back there, there was no prairie left. But you have a prairie here…You have all been great stewards of this site, and I'm looking forward to learning all the flora and fauna."

"In the last few years, we've learned how ignorant we are-dark energy, dark matter, we know nothing of them, yet it's all connected," said Oddone, who will become the lab's fifth director on July 1, 2005. "In nature, we see the wings of a butterfly, we see supernovas, we see back to the big bang-Fermilab is the place where we ask the most important questions about them, like the origin of mass, how many dimension are there, how did the universe evolve. Now I am re-engaged in the field that I come from, the field that I love."

Oddone, 60, has been Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1991, with responsibility for scientific programs in a multidiscipline lab with a $500 million annual budget. He was selected as Fermilab's director after a search of more than six months, culminating in a meeting with, and approval by, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham just over a week ago.

"He is the best combination we could imagine," said Don Hartill of Cornell University, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Universities Research Association, Inc., which operates Fermilab under contract with the Department of Energy.
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