Marie Herman wins award for unsung heroes

Technical Division Head Giorgio Apollonari gives Marie Herman the Management Support Fellowship Award.

Technical Division's administrative assistant manager Marie Herman strives to be an ambassador for her profession. And her colleagues throughout the country think she's doing a good job.

In February, Herman won the Management Support Fellowship Award, created this year by DeskDemon to highlight the often unrecognized achievements of support professionals.

"They really are the backbone of most companies in the world," said Susan Silva, managing editor of DeskDemon, an online resource group for administrative assistants.

Candidates were nominated based on their organizational and computer skills, as well as their ability to train and mentor colleagues. Silva said Herman "hit them all."

"Marie is awesome," Silva said. "She has been very active in the community."

At Fermilab, Herman has been a valued member of the Technical Division since she started working there in November 2007. She is currently spearheading the group's transition to the Fermi Time and Labor reporting system from a paper-based system.

"Her computer skills are a good example of what every human being should know going into the 21st century," said Technical Division Head Giorgio Apollinari. "She brought that to the job from her first day."

Herman said she has kept up with the changing demands of her profession in a fast-paced world. "Now it's not mail or overnight delivery or fax," she said. "It's e-mail, Twitter and instant messaging in real time. There's far greater pressure to be up to speed on every new development immediately."

Herman hopes her award creates more visibility for administrative assistants throughout Fermilab and elsewhere.

"I think in a way it's too easy to take our work for granted," Herman said. "We're helping at least to free other people up for very important work."

-- Kristine Crane

In Memoriam: Wu-Ki Tung

Wu-Ki Tung

We are sad to announce that our long-time friend and colleague Wu-Ki Tung died Monday, March 30, at his home in Seattle, Washington. Wu-Ki, Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University and Affiliated Professor at University of Washington, had a long and distinguished career as a theorist with a particular fascination for the quark-parton model and perturbative quantum chromodynamics.

The enriching relationships that Wu-Ki had with experimentalists at Fermilab were born from the series of Snowmass workshops in the mid-80s. The idea of a hands-on collaboration between theorists and experimentalists began at these workshops and evolved into the Coordinated Theoretical-Experimental Project on QCD (CTEQ), with Wu-Ki as a founding father. Under his leadership, the CTEQ collaboration began the work that resulted in the widely used CTEQ parton distribution sets that describe the composition of protons and how its building blocks behave in high-energy collisions. This work has played an important role in the interpretation of Fermilab experimental results.

Wu-Ki also enjoyed a significant role in lecturing and interacting with the students at the CTEQ schools on QCD Analysis and Phenomenology.

Wu-Ki loved physics and teaching. He continued formulating new ideas with colleagues in publications as recently as two weeks ago.

As news of Wu-Ki's death began to spread within the community, e-mails and phone calls conveyed that we lost a dear friend, a productive scholar and a very gentle man. Our sympathies are with his wife Beatrice and his sons Lei and Bruce.

-- Jorge G. Morfin and Harry Weerts