December 21, 2024
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Fermilab research center being renamed in honor of trailblazing female physicist

Helen Edwards helped design the near-light-speed Tevatron particle accelerator

By Joey Weslo

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia pictured in 2003, with its main injector accelerator (smaller ring left) and the Tevatron accelerator (right) which is four miles in circumference. Fermilab is renaming an engineering center in honor of the particle physicist Helen Edwards, who worked at Fermilab for over four decades, including 25 overseeing the construction and operation of the Tevatron particle accelerator. (Shaw Suburban)

A research center at Batavia’s Fermilab is being renamed in honor of the woman who oversaw for 25 years the most powerful particle collider in the world.

The Integrated Engineering Research Center is being renamed after physicist Helen Edwards, who helped guide the national laboratory’s particle research for four decades. Edwards helped construct and operate the Tevatron, Fermilab’s revolutionary machine that discovered two fundamental particles by smashing protons together at 99.999954% the speed of light.

Edwards' pioneering work earned her a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1988 and the National Medal of Technology in 1989, according to a news release from U.S. Rep. Bill Foster, D-Naperville, who worked with Edwards at Fermilab and pushed for federal legislation to name the center in her honor. Edwards died in 2016.

“Edwards was a scientific and technical leader of Fermilab from its earliest days, and she was a dear friend,” Foster said in the release. “She was deeply committed to the accelerator research and it is altogether fitting that the center bears her name.”

After passage of a bicameral resolution, Foster said he was thrilled his colleagues were able to get the resolution past the finish line in honor of Edwards’ memory, according to the release.

“Edwards’ visionary leadership and foresight shaped Fermilab’s direction for many decades and will continue far into the future,” Lia Merminga, director of Fermilab, said in the release. “She has been an inspiration to me since my early days as a graduate student at Fermilab.”

Merminga said the Helen Edwards Engineering Center will be a testament to visionary science and leadership, according to the release.

The resolution heads to President Joe Biden’s desk to be officially signed into law.

The Tevatron deepened the world’s understanding of particle physics and the quantum universe through its groundbreaking discoveries of the top quark in 1995 and the tau neutrino in 2000. The Tevatron was decommissioned in 2011, according to the release.

The success of the Tevatron project inspired new accelerator projects such as the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility, according to the release.

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