Michael Marx

Michael Marx, Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Associate Vice President for Brookhaven Affairs died at his home on August 2, 2011 after a brief struggle with cancer. He leaves behind his beloved wife, Lynn, and his children, Vincent, Teresa, Clara, Rachel, Miriam and Richard.

Mike was born July 14, 1946 in Durban, South Africa. He studied at the Forest Hill High School, at the City College of New York and at MIT. His Ph.D. dissertation research, done in Brookhaven National Laboratory, was about proton-antiproton collisions. After receiving the Ph.D. he joined BNL in 1975.

Mike came to Stony Brook University (at the time still SUNY, Stony Brook) in 1980. In the early 1980's he was active in the development of BNL's Isabelle collider. He worked with Paul Grannis as Deputy Spokesman and Detector Coordinator on the D0 experiment at FermiLab - the experiment that led to many discoveries, including the dicovery of the top quark. He was the leader of one of the working groups designing experiments for the Superconducting Supercollider. Although the SSC was cancelled, some of the detector concepts Mike promoted were later adopted at the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. In 1995 he became Deputy Project Director of the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, and in 2001 he was the project manager of the KOPIO project. Most recently he was instrumental in setting up the joint BNL-SBU Center for Accelerator Science and Education (CASE).

He served as Associate Dean in the Colleege of Arts and Sciences, and President of the Arts and Sciences Senate. He was Associate Vice President for Brookhaven Affairs since 2008.

Here is what Mike said on the occasion of his 30th anniversary of being at Stony Brook University:

"It is hard to believe that thirty years at Stony Brook have gone by. I benefited from the unique opportunity of working on "Big Science" experiments at nearby Brookhaven, Fermilab in Chicago, and the Supercollider in Texas (cancelled after $2 billion was spent) that took me away from campus for many years. In 2006 I returned to campus after my last big project was cancelled (a common theme perhaps), and, in order to partially repay my debt to Stony Brook for so many years of support, began to work on the dark side - administration. I worked first as an Associate Dean in Arts and Sciences, and then in 2008 joined the Provost in his role as Vice President for Brookhaven Laboratory Affairs. This has turned out to be one of the most rewarding assignments of my career. My job, it turns out, is to make people at both the university and the laboratory happy, by identifying new opportunities and facilitating and nurturing them. My wife claims that I basically run a dating agency and make things happen - a career path I could never have envisioned when I started at Stony Book in 1980."