Women in Science Speaker Series Luncheon Honoring Dr. Persis S. Drell
Menlo Park, California
May 13, 2011
Hosted by Hosted by: The Bay Area Region of the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science
About our Honoree Dr. Persis S. Drell is Professor and Director of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. In 2007, Dr. Drell was the first woman to be named to this prestigious position and is only the second woman to head a U.S. national laboratory. She received her B.A. in mathematics and physics from Wellesley College and her Ph.D. in atomic physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983. She then switched to high-energy experimental physics and worked as a postdoctoral scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She joined the faculty of the Physics Department at Cornell University in 1988. In 2000, she became head of the Cornell high-energy group, and, in 2001, she was named deputy director of Cornells' Laboratory of Nuclear Studies. In 2002, Dr. Drell accepted a position as Professor and Director of Research at SLAC and, subsequently, was named SLAC's Director. Her current research activities are in particle astrophysics. In sprint of 2006, Dr. Drell was the Morris Loeb Lecturer in Physics at Harvard University. Dr. Drell has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, in 2010, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She was the Occam Lecturer at Merton College, Oxford in the winter of 2011. Dr. Drell is married to accelerator physicist, James Welch. They have three children.