Texas A&M in the early 1960s wasn't an obvious place to put a machine that can accelerate charged particles to fractions of the speed of light, but it was also a time of change.
James Earl Rudder was the university's president, the Corps of Cadets became voluntary and women and African-Americans were admitted as students. The desire to chart a different course, Cyclotron Institute Director Sherry Yennello said Friday, extended to the pursuit of excellence in research. The Welch Foundation's invitation in 1961 for the university to submit a proposal to build a modern cyclotron on campus was the start, she said, of what became a major turning point in Texas A&M's transition from an agricultural and mechanical college to the major research entity it is today.
Nobel Prize winners Glenn Seaborg and Willard Libby helped dedicate the Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute on Dec. 4, 1967. On Friday, a three-day symposium celebrating the 50th anniversary of the institute wrapped up.
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Speaking at the anniversary ceremony, Texas A&M President Michael K. Young called it an exciting day for the university to reflect on securing the cyclotron through a partnership between its three founding partners, the Atomic Energy Commission, the state of Texas and the Welch Foundation, at a time when the university was not known as a research giant.
"We look at the work that started 50 years ago and we see what we have become, with one of the top programs in the country, with the amount of funding that's available, with the breakthroughs that have been made by so many of the great professors who are with us here today, because there was that vision, there was that moment, and there was that ambition on the part of this university that we can do this," Young said.
Also speaking at Friday's ceremony in the Hawking Auditorium in the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, Karen Butler-Purry, interim vice-president for research, called the establishment of the cyclotron a "watershed moment" that pushed Texas A&M toward the vanguard of nuclear research. She said the institute generates about $7.5 million in overall external research funding each year. A press release announcing the anniversary stated that companies including Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the U.S. Navy Laboratories rent the facilities to perform testing.
The Cyclotron Institute's facilities have been used for research across many scientific disciplines, with the focus being "first and foremost" on scientific discovery, Yennello said, as well as workforce development and radiation testing as a way to "give back to society."
The original K150 cyclotron came online in 1967, and was followed 20 years later by a K500. Timothy Hallman, associate director of science for nuclear physics at the U.S. Department of Energy, said the institute is one of five Centers for Excellence designated by the DOE, calling it a "truly one of our crown jewels."
The symposium also included several talks on nuclear science, historical perspectives from former Cyclotron Institute directors and tours of the facility.