A Brief History of Bonner Lab
The T. W. Bonner Nuclear Laboratory was named and dedicated in 1963 to honor the memory and accomplishments of Tom Wilkerson Bonner who died in 1961 at the age of 51. Tom had been professor and Chairman of the Physics Department for many years. The laboratory was constructed in 1953 to house a new 5.5 MV CN van de Graaff vertical accelerator. It was expanded in 1961 to accommodate a 6 MV model EN Tandem van de Graaff accelerator. According to the Rice University General Announcements catalog of 1963-64, the professors working in the lab were as follows: Phillips (Department Chairman and first Director of Bonner Lab), Risser, Stelson, Class (associate professor), and Barnard (assistant professor).
During the next 24 years, G. C. Phillips led the laboratory into the post-van de Graaf era. In particular, it was Gerry and a few others including Harry Palevsky and George Igo who created the discipline of "Intermediate Energy Physics" in the late sixties by performing the first ever precision scattering experiments of 1 GeV protons from deuterium, helium, and carbon at the then venerable Cosmotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The outcome of these early studies was the era of the meson factories - LAMPF, SIN and TRIUMF. Naturally Gerry played a major role at LAMPF, doing many experiments there with his team and also organizing and then serving as the first Chair of the LAMPF Users Group, Inc., the model for the users organizations at all modern accelerators. The Inc. says more than we have room for here.
In 1987, Billy Bonner was named
Director of Bonner Lab and Gerry went on to take over as President of a company
he and others had started in
From the outset, the lab was funded by the US Department of Energy (and its predecessor agencies USAEC and ERDA). Until 1975, the Office of Nuclear Physics provided funding for the Lab. With the addition of then Assistant Professor J. B. Roberts, a separate grant from the Office of High Energy Physics was awarded and the grant continues to the present. Principal Investigators for the Nuclear Physics Grant are Bonner and Mutchler and for the High Energy Physics Grant, Bonner and Roberts.
In 1993, it came as a shock to the occupants of Bonner Lab to learn that the board of governors of Rice University had decided that the building that had been home for forty years was to be razed in order to provide a building site for (I'm not making this up) a Computational Engineering Building. After arduous negotiation over the course of a year, it was finally settled that Bonner Lab would be relocated to Herman Brown Hall. More than twelve years after the renovation of the space and the actual move in August, 1994, it is apparent that the relocation, while wrenching, has been successful. The lab space is more useful than what we had before, and the offices are far superior to our previous quarters. Bonner Lab continues to thrive even in these times of reduced funding for basic research. The real secret to our success is the people. So, it’s forward in the new century with great scientific discoveries all but certain.