Swapan Chattopadhyay Named as AAAS Fellow

Newport News — Swapan Chattopadhyay, Associate Director for Accelerators at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, has been awarded the distinction of Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The award will be presented at the 2006 AAAS Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 18.

The honor of being named a Fellow recognizes individual AAAS members for their "efforts toward advancing science or fostering applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished." This year, 376 members were elevated to the rank of Fellow.

Chattopadhyay was cited for his "fundamental contributions to accelerator science, including phase-space cooling, innovative collider designs, and pioneering femto-sources and for mentoring accelerator scientists at facilities worldwide, especially in developing countries." In his position, he is responsible for all aspects of Jefferson Lab's accelerator and Free-Electron Laser (FEL) programs, including research and development, and operations, maintenance and upgrades of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility and the Free-Electron Laser. Chattopadhyay leads a team of more than 350 in research of the physics of particles and light beams, forefront electronics, superconductivity, surface science, cryogenics, and computer process control applications.

"What an honor to be recognized by the AAAS for the development of research tools for the world and rewarding task of mentoring scientists worldwide," Chattopadhyay said.

Founded in 1848, AAAS represents the world's largest federation of scientists and works to advance science for human well-being through its projects, programs, and publications. With more than 138,000 members and 275 affiliated societies, AAAS conducts many programs in the areas of science policy, science education, and international scientific cooperation. AAAS publishes the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science. The tradition of naming AAAS Fellows began in 1874.

Swapan Chattopadhyay received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1982. Following a two year association as Scientific Attache at CERN (1982-1984), he returned to Berkeley Lab in 1984, where he made contributions to the Advanced Light Source from its design to commissioning (1984-1992) and was the Founder/Director (1992) of the Center for Beam Physics until his move to Jefferson Lab in 2001. He has contributed to the development of accelerators in Europe, India, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, People's Republic of China and North America. He established the first collaboration between Berkeley Lab and Jefferson Lab on the development of FELs based on the superconducting radio frequency technology. Since 2002, he has served on the Governor's Advisory Board of the Commonwealth of Virginia.