Satoshi Ozaki, a physicist at the U.S.
Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, will be honored
as a distinguished Asian American professional at a ceremony on May 9 at the
annual Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Celebration to be held at Stony
Brook University's Charles B. Wang Center.
"I am honored to receive this recognition," Ozaki said. "I
also appreciate the respect I have received from the colleagues with whom I
have worked at Brookhaven Lab over many decades and from the members of the
Laboratory's Asian Pacific American Association as a friend and a senior
advisor."
The Asian American Advisory Board of the Suffolk County Office of Minority
Affairs and the Charles B. Wang Center organize the Asian Pacific American Heritage
Month Celebration in cooperation with Brookhaven Lab's Asian Pacific American
Association, the Taiwanese American Association on Long Island, and the Filipino
American Community Organizations of Long Island.
Ozaki will be unable to attend the May 9 ceremony, so Lab Director Sam Aronson
will accept a proclamation from County Executive Steve Levy on behalf of Ozaki
at the Wang Center Theater in a ceremony starting at 4 p.m.
Ozaki, with Brookhaven Lab's Michael Harrison, led the decade-long development
and construction of the Laboratory's world-class accelerator, the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). About 1,000 physicists from around the world run
experiments at RHIC, colliding subatomic particles known as heavy ions head-on
to study the type of matter that existed a millionth of a second after the Big
Bang. In 2005, RHIC physicists discovered a "perfect" liquid, a
type of matter that has not existed since the beginning of the universe.
In 2002, RHIC became the world' first and only accelerator to collide
high-energy beams of polarized protons - protons that spin in the same
direction. Physicists at RHIC hope to solve the mystery of what causes proton
spin.
Before Ozaki started the RHIC Project, he was invited in 1981 to join the National
Laboratory for High Energy Physics, a research institute in Japan also known
as KEK, to direct the construction of TRISTAN, the first major high-energy particle
collider in the country. Ozaki completed TRISTAN on time and within budget.
The facility accelerates and stores beams of electrons and positrons at 30 billion
electron volts, the highest energy in the world at the time the accelerator
started operations in 1987.
After earning a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
in 1959, Ozaki joined Brookhaven Lab as a research associate. He rose through
the ranks to become a tenured senior physicist in 1972. He joined KEK in 1981
to work on TRISTAN, and then returned to Brookhaven in 1989 to head the RHIC
Project. Besides completing the $660-million collider, Ozaki was instrumental
in bringing polarized proton capability to RHIC with funding support from the
RIKEN Institute of Japan.
Since 2000, Ozaki has been the Special Assistant to the Laboratory Director
on Accelerator Projects, and from 2005 to 2007, Ozaki directed the Accelerator
Systems Division for Brookhaven's NSLS-II Project. Currently, he is a
senior project advisor for the project, which involves the construction of a
$912-million synchrotron light source that will provide extremely bright x-rays
for basic and applied research in many areas of science.
Ozaki serves on numerous advisory and review committees for U.S. and international
institutions, laboratories and government agencies. He is a Fellow of the American
Physical Society (APS), and he was awarded the APS 2009 Robert R. Wilson Prize
for outstanding achievement in the physics of particle accelerators. He was
honored as "Man of the Year in Science" by the Times Beacon Record
Newspapers in 2008, and in 2007, Ozaki, with Brookhaven's Michael Harrison,
received the IEEE Particle Accelerator Science & Technology Award.