5. Samuel Aronson, Ph.D.

Physicist, mentor, leader, trailblazer. Aronson has dedicated much of his life’s work to overseeing the cutting-edge operations of Brookhaven National Lab. Since joining its accelerator department in 1978, he has continued to climb the ranks, pushing the envelope of the complex’s pioneering experiments with each step, ultimately supervising many of the Lab’s internationally recognized scientific breakthroughs and advances, such as its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Physicists from around the world use the Collider to study what the universe could have resembled during its first moments of creation. Quarks, gluons, enigmatic dark matter—Aronson’s Beautiful Mind contemplates them all.