Biography|Michael Witherell — The Randall Laboratory Degree Taken at Eighteen

People who meet Michael Witherell as a laboratory director tend to start the story in Illinois or on the Berkeley hill.

The first university building that belongs in the file is Randall Laboratory, at 450 Church Street on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor.

He took a Bachelor of Science here in 1968.

The Toledo Blade later recorded the age: eighteen, three years after a fifteen-year-old salutatorian left St. Francis de Sales in Toledo.

The American Institute of Physics biographical file and Berkeley Lab's own profile both list the same year and campus.

Randall Laboratory is the historic home of Michigan physics, named for Harrison Randall.

A plaque at the southeast entrance marks the Michigan Summer Symposium in Theoretical Physics, held here from 1928 to 1941.

That marker is later than Witherell's undergraduate years. It still identifies the building a visitor can stand in.

The degree month is not in the public sources used here. The year is.

From this block the next stop was Madison, not a private house in Ann Arbor.

Photo: Reidar Hahn, public domain (U.S. Department of Energy work), via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait made at Fermilab, 15 August 2003.

Building photo: Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.