The leader of SLAC’s involvement in the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search and an instrument scientist with the Linac Coherent Light Source X-ray laser have been appointed senior staff scientists at SLAC.
Richard Partridge, a longtime physics professor at Brown University whose experience at SLAC dates back to his work on particle physics experiments in the late 1970s, was named a senior staff scientist Feb. 1. He had been a full-time project scientist at SLAC since 2010.
And Christoph Bostedt, who joined SLAC in 2009 as an instrument scientist for the Atomic, Molecular and Optical science instrument at LCLS and last year received a prestigious international prize for his X-ray research, was appointed senior staff scientist earlier this month.
Of the nearly 175 staff scientists at SLAC, including distinguished, senior, associate and other staff scientists, five have been named “distinguished staff scientists” – the lab’s highest recognition for its scientific staff – and 36, or about 1 in 5, are senior staff scientists. Partridge and Bostedt are the only researchers to receive the title this year.
Richard Partridge
Partridge’s expertise is in sniffing out subatomic particles and their properties, and his work has included designing and building detector systems, developing software and doing physics analysis.
As a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., he worked on SLAC’s Crystal Ball, a spherical crystal-filled detector that recorded particle collisions. As a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Santa Cruz, he worked on another SLAC detector, the Mark III, to gather more details about the J/psi particle that had been jointly discovered by scientists from SLAC and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Partridge joined Brown University in 1986, teaching and supervising undergraduate and graduate students in a range of research projects while pursuing his own research at the D-Zero particle physics experiment at Fermilab’s Tevatron collider. There he contributed to the discovery of the top quark, the most massive known elementary particle; built the D-Zero luminosity monitors that recorded the intensity of the Tevatron beams; and held a leadership role in developing the high-luminosity detector upgrades.
Partridge returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, working on a variety of projects at SLAC and Fermilab, and now is heading up SLAC’s involvement in the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment, which hunts for dark matter particles deep within a former iron mine in Minnesota.
“I’ve never had any trouble finding interesting things to do,” Partridge said. He is also deputy project manager for a deeper, more sensitive dark matter experiment planned in Canada, dubbed SuperCDMS SNOLAB, in which SLAC is set to play a key role.
David MacFarlane, director of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at SLAC, said of Partridge, “His leadership is essential to the planned role for SLAC in SuperCDMS and in our engagement in the science of the experiment.”
Partridge’s management role in that project is “a strong indication of the high regard that the management group has for him,” said Blas Cabrera, a spokesman for the CDMS project.
While he is no longer a Brown professor, Partridge said he enjoys the direct supervision of researchers he works with at SLAC, including students and graduate students.
“The great thing about working with students one on one is it becomes a conversation. It becomes an interaction,” he said. “It’s a very different dynamic from classroom teaching.”
Christoph Bostedt
Bostedt said he explained to his daughters, ages 3 and 5, that the senior scientist appointment is like graduating from one stage of school to another.
“It gives a new dimension to my scientist life at SLAC, in addition to being a big honor and great pleasure and acknowledgment of what I’m trying to do here,” he said. “I clearly take this as encouragement to actively think about and work on my own science initiatives.”
When LCLS Director Jo Stöhr announced the appointment at a meeting, Bostedt said, there were “happy cheers from all kinds of employees,” and he joked that those comments actually exceeded the many comments he received that day about the retro Volkswagen bus T-shirt he had worn for the first time to work.
“Christoph is the first staff scientist at LCLS to be promoted to senior scientist,” said Uwe Bergmann, deputy LCLS director. “We are confident that his scientific leadership will set an example for our other staff scientists.”
Christoph Bostedt works with a student intern at SLAC. (Credit: Matt Beardsley) Click to view full-size image.
Bostedt helped design and commission the instruments used in the first experiments at the LCLS. He is best known for his pioneering studies of atomic clusters exposed to powerful X-ray and ultraviolet lasers in Germany and at SLAC, which help inform scientists about fundamental interactions between ultra-intense light and matter. Stöhr noted Bostedt’s high standing in the scientific community and the praise his work has garnered from leading international scientists.
Bostedt received his PhD in 2002 based on studies at Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore national labs, and he joined the Berlin Institute of Technology (TU Berlin) in 2004 as a Habilitand, a position akin to a junior faculty member. There he supervised several students and postdoctoral researchers.
SLAC’s Ingolf Lindau, chairman of a lab-wide committee that reviewed the senior staff scientist appointments, noted that Bostedt “is exceedingly well qualified,” with reference letters praising “his outstanding scientific work, his superb experimental skills, his organizational talents, and his dedication to the support of outside users at LCLS.”
