Kirk Mcdonald

Biography

Kirk McDonald was raised in Tucson, Arizona, where he graduated from the University of Arizona in 1966 in physics. Six years later, he received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in the field of high-energy particle physics, using the Caltech electron synchrotron with fellow graduate students. They effectively took over the facility when the senior professors focused their research on new larger accelerators at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stanford University. He then went to CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, on a highly competitive CERN fellowship, measuring correlations of particles produced in the world’s highest-energy collisions at the time, with the then-new Intersecting Storage Rings invented by Princeton physicist Gerry O’Neill. Kirk returned to the United States in 1975, winning an honorific Enrico Fermi Fellowship at the University of Chicago. Only a few months after the discovery of the charmed quark at Brookhaven and Stanford, which had launched a frenzy of experimental and theoretical activity, this was an opportune time in particle physics. Kirk joined a three-month-old embryonic collaboration between Chicago and Princeton physicists to study the quark structure of hadrons at Fermilab, the world’s highest-energy accelerator laboratory at the time. These experiments were based on an ambitious high-resolution particle detector using the huge magnet built after World War II by Fermi himself for the 485-MeV Chicago synchrocyclotron.

Research Interest

Physics