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Archives, History & Records Office

Hours: By appointment Monday-Friday during regular work hours.


Contact:

Archives E-mail: slacarc[@]slac.stanford.edu
RM E-mail: recordsmgt[@]slac.stanford.edu
Phone: (650)926-3091
Post: SLAC Archives and History Office, M/S 82, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025.

Office Location: Bldg.50, Rm.122



Nobel Prizes at SLAC

Burton Richter 1976 Burton Richter (SLAC) and Samuel C. C. Ting (MIT)shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind." (Logbook page from J/Psi particle discovery experiment.) (Pictured: Burton Richter at SLAC in 1976)

Burton Richter Nobel Prize organization interview video
Richard E. Taylor (SLAC), Jerome I. Friedman (MIT), and Henry W. Kendall (MIT) shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics." (Pictured: Richard Taylor (top), Group at Nobel Ceremony in Stockholm in 1990, with Friedman, Kendall and Taylor in front row)

Richard E. Taylor Nobel Prize organization interview video
Richard Taylor, 1990      Nobel group, with Friedman, Kendall and Taylor in 
front
Martin Perl 1996 Martin L. Perl won the 1995 Nobel Prize "for the discovery of the tau lepton." (Logbook page from the tau lepton discovery experiment.) (Pictured: Perl at Nobel Press Conference, October 1995)

Martin Perl Nobel Prize organization interview video
Roger Kornberg won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription" (determining how DNA's genetic blueprint is read and used to direct the process of protein manufacture). A significant portion of his research was carried out at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL). (Pictured: April 2001 issue of Science with RNA polymerase on the cover.)

Roger Kornberg Nobel Prize organization interview video
Science Magazine cover, 2001
David Hitlin, Maskawa, Kobayashi and Jonathan Dorfan 
at Nobel Ceremonies, 2008 Yoichiro Nambu (Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, IL) Makoto Kobayashi (High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan) and Toshihide Maskawa (Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Japan) share the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for their studies of broken symmetries detected -- exactly as previously predicted by the Nobel laureates -- at both Babar (SLAC) and at Belle (KEK) in 2001. (Pictured: From left David Hitlin (Caltech), Toshihide Maskawa (Kyoto U.), Makoto Kobayashi (KEK), and Jonathan Dorfan (Stanford U./SLAC))
Ada Yonath shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry ""for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome," landmark work that had some of its early foundation in studies at SSRL. Ada Yonath at the
Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel (Miki Koren photo, Weizmann Institute)
Aerial view of SPEAR The SSRL SPEAR Storage Ring has been the site of the discoveries which led to the award of the 1976 and 1995 prizes in physics, and of the 2006, 2009 and 2012 prizes in chemistry.
Brian Kobilka MD, professor and chair of molecular and cellular physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on G-protein-coupled receptors. Kobilka and his colleagues worked mostly at the Argonne National Laboratory Synchrotron, but they also used SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) in the mid 1990s and early 2000s to develop techniques for determining the structure of protein receptors.

Kobilka Nobel Prize organization interview transcript
Brian Kobilka, 2012 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
Frances Arnold, 2018 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Dr. Frances H. Arnold (CalTech) was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering work on the directed evolution of enzymes. Structural investigations on enzymes and diffaction data collection conducted at SSRL have resulted in the addition of dozens of Protein Data Bank entries and publications, as well as more environmentally friendly manufacturing of chemical substances and production of renewable fuels.

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Last Updated: 03/31/2022