In Memoriam: Wilson Cross

Wilson Cross

Wilson Cross, known at Fermilab for his vibrant personality and dedication to his work, died on June 25 at the age of 55.

Cross worked in the laboratory's Cryogenics Department for 30 years and had cultivated a wealth of knowledge on the job, said his supervisor, Jay Theilacker.

"Some people might get protective of that knowledge," Theilacker said. "But Wilson had no problem teaching people everything he knew in an enthusiastic way."

Cross was involved in building a large number of cryogenic components in the Tevatron, antiproton and superconducting radio-frequency facilities.

Not long after Cross started at Fermilab, he convinced his brother Terry to join him. For the past 10 years, they worked in offices side-by-side.

"He was always happy," Terry Cross said. "He loved what he did and he did it well."

Cross was a fun-loving person, Theilacker said.

"He had the attitude that, if we have to be here at work, we might as well have fun doing it," he said. "If he saw negativity, he would address it and turn it around. That made everyone else's environment better, too."

Cross built a network of people whom he could count on at the laboratory and who relied on his help in return, Theilacker said. One of those people was the Technical Division's Ed Hagler, who continued the friendship he developed with Cross even after he moved to a separate workspace at the laboratory. Cross liked to stop by and remind Hagler of practical jokes from their early days, Hagler said.

Cross was diagnosed with what he called a "treatable but incurable" form of leukemia in 2001. According to those around him, he was determined not to let that get him down.

"He worked right up to the end," Hagler said. "I could tell that that was very important to him."

-- Kathryn Grim

Jackie Coleman retirement party Thursday, July 15

The Directorate will host a retirement party for Jackie Coleman at 4 p.m. on Thursday, July 15 on the second floor crossover. Coleman will retire this summer after nearly 38-consecutive years of service to the laboratory. Stop by and wish her well.

Read Coleman's retirement profile.

Oddone gets second five years as Fermilab director

From Beacon News, July 10, 2010

"This will be a really exciting time."

That's Pier Oddone, master of understatement. The director of Fermilab for the past five years, Oddone has led the country's premier particle physics lab through budget cuts, new discoveries and the completion of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, the machine that will make Fermilab's own collider obsolete.

The Fermi Research Alliance board of directors last week announced Oddone's reappointment to a second five-year term as director. In the upcoming half-decade, Fermi's collider will shut down completely, and the lab will turn its focus to numerous other projects in an attempt to stay on the forefront of particle research.

But if any of this sweeping change is making Oddone nervous, he's not saying. In fact, he has nothing but optimism for the coming years, and excitement for the future.

That, he says, is what particle physics is all about: exploring the unknown. Fermilab will no longer be able to compete when it comes to high-energy experiments, so it's branching out into wide-ranging experiments involving muons, neutrinos and dark energy.

"The lab is changing all the time," he said. "We're always tackling new experiments, and looking forward to what is not known."

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