Boyce McDaniel

Boyce Dawkins McDaniel (June 11, 1917 – May 8, 2002) was an American nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later directed the Cornell University Laboratory of Nuclear Studies (LNS). McDaniel was skilled in constructing "atom smashing" devices to study the fundamental structure of matter and helped to build the most powerful particle accelerators of his time. Together with his graduate student, he invented the pair spectrometer.

During World War II, McDaniel used his electronics expertise to help develop cyclotrons used to separate Uranium isotopes. McDaniel is also noted as having performed the final check on the first atomic bomb prior to its detonation in the Trinity test, during a lightning storm.

Biography Born in Brevard, North Carolina, McDaniel attended Chesterville High School in Ohio. After graduating in 1933, he attended Ohio Wesleyan University, from which he graduated in 1938 with a Bachelor of Science. His initial postgraduate studies took place at the Case School of Applied Science, graduating with a master's degree in 1940.

After the outbreak of World War II, McDaniel joined Bacher in Los Alamos, New Mexico to work for the Manhattan Project, where he became a part of Robert R. Wilson's cyclotron research team. McDaniel is also noted as having performed the final check on the first atomic bomb prior to its detonation in the Trinity test. He was a co-founder of Cornell's Laboratory for Nuclear Studies (LNS) and had helped create the 300 megavolt (MeV) electron synchrotron, one of the first such accelerators in the world. He and Wilson, who was McDaniel's predecessor as director of LNS, built three more electron synchrotrons of 1 GeV, 2 GeV, and 10 GeV, each of which enabled physicists to study phenomena in a new energy range. He was a Fulbright research fellow in 1953 at the Australian National University and a Guggenheim fellow in 1959 at the University of Rome. +Accelerators That McDaniel Helped Develop Power!!Year

1979 Upon returning to Cornell in 1974, McDaniel proposed upgrading the then existing 10 GeV synchrotron with an 8 GeV electron-positron storage ring, which would greatly increase the energy of particle collisions when the particles in the storage ring hit the particles traveling in the opposite direction in the synchrotron. When constructed in 1979, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring became the world's primary source of information about one of the fundamental building blocks of matter, the b-quark. After the end of particle physics experiments 20 years later, CESR is now used as a test facility of damping rings for a future international linear collider. In 1981, McDaniel developed a proposal for a new mile-diameter electron-positron collider called CESR II, but could not obtain the necessary $200 million in funding for it. In 1988, McDaniel was Visiting Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University.

Sexual harassment allegation In 1975, 11 years before the Supreme Court decision in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson recognized sexual harassment as a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Carmita Dickerson Wood, an administrative assistant to McDaniel, quit her job after years of alleged sexual harassment by McDaniel, bringing her case to Lin Farley and the Working Women United organization which Farley chaired. Wood was denied unemployment benefits by Cornell after having cited "personal reasons" as the cause of her departure. She was later placed in another job on Cornell's campus. No formal investigation into the allegations was conducted, and McDaniel was not formally investigated by Cornell nor reprimanded. Nevertheless, the incident contributed to a surge in interest in workplace sexual harassment which culminated in the 1986 decision.

Honors McDaniel was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1981. He was a governing board member of Fermilab, a trustee of the Associated Universities, a member of the Department of Energy High Energy Advisory Panel, a trustee of the Universities Research Association and a board member of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

In 1993, the McDaniels donated a farm to the Cornell Plantations, which named the 60.6 acre property the Jane McDaniel Preserve.

In 2002, McDaniel died of a heart attack in Ithaca, New York, aged 84.