“Why do you talk so much? Why don’t you do something?” That barb 30 years ago by Wolfgang Panofsky, then director of SLAC, planted the seed that Brookhaven National Laboratory researcher Mel Month quickly nurtured into the US Particle Accelerator School (USPAS). The first session was held in 1981 at Fermilab. At the time, Panofsky and Month, an accelerator physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, were on a US Department of Energy (DOE) committee looking into accelerator education.
Now, every January and June, a two-week session is hosted by a different US university, which approves the instructors and courses and offers academic credit to participants; in 1987, the USPAS switched its courses from a not-for-credit seminar style to a more rigorous university style. Typically, 12 courses are offered per session, with a mix of two-week core courses and one-week specialty courses. For example, at the session last month, which was sponsored...
