Biography|Michael Witherell — The Wilson Hall Office He Took on 1 July 1999

On 1 July 1999 Michael Witherell became the fourth director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

FermiNews, the laboratory's own paper, recorded the start date the next morning: he moved into the traditional director's office on the second floor of Wilson Hall.

Universities Research Association had named him on 5 March 1999 to succeed John Peoples Jr., whose term ended 30 June.

The announcement ran from Batavia under the URA and Department of Energy letterhead.

He came from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he had been on the physics faculty since 1981 and a full professor since 1986.

In 1990 the American Physical Society had given him the W. K. H. Panofsky Prize for a Fermilab charm-quark experiment that used silicon microstrip detectors.

The 1998 election to the National Academy of Sciences sat on the same public record.

Wilson Hall is the sixteen-story high-rise at the center of the Batavia site, the building a visitor can see from the internal roads.

The director's office is not a private residence. It is a documented workplace on a national laboratory campus that admits the public under lab security rules.

He held the post through 30 June 2005, then returned to Santa Barbara as vice chancellor for research.

Piermaria Oddone succeeded him on 1 July 2005.

Photo: Reidar Hahn, public domain (U.S. Department of Energy work), via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait made in this building's orbit on 15 August 2003, during the directorship.

Building photo: WMGoBuffs, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.