Gourlay Named Acting Director of AFRD as Barletta Departs

Steve Gourlay, head of Berkeley Lab's Superconducting Magnet Program in the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division, has been named by Lab Director Steve Chu to serve as Acting Director of AFRD, effective next week. He will succeed Bill Barletta, who after 12 years as Director of AFRD resigned to accept a position as Director of the U.S. Particle Accelerator School at Fermilab.

Gourlay, here since 1997 and a senior staff scientist since 2002, has managed a vertically integrated effort to define and advance the cutting edge of superconducting magnet technology for accelerators. The Department of Energy Office of High Energy Physics has recognized AFRD's program in superconducting magnet R&D as the world leader in developing high-field magnets for future accelerators.

He also heads the magnet development component of the United States Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Accelerator Research Program that is a collaboration of three national labs -- Berkeley, Brookhaven and Fermi.

After Receiving his PhD in high energy physics from the University of California, Davis, in 1985, Gourlay joined Fermilab as a research associate and participated in the construction and running of experiment E-687, "High Energy Photoproduction of States Containing Heavy Quarks and other Rare Phenomena,"

He joined the Fermilab Advanced Magnet R&D Group in 1988 as project physicist for the Low Beta Project, where he was in charge of constructing the high gradient, interaction region quadrupoles for the Fermilab collider experiments. During that time he also worked on the development of dipoles for the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) and was a member of the Solenoidal Detector Collaboration.   As head of the Superconducting Magnet Group at Fermilab in 1995, Gourlay was in charge of a project to design a high gradient superconducting quadrupole for the LHC interaction regions. A year later, he served a one-year appointment as a Scientific Associate at CERN as part of the US/CERN collaboration for the LHC.