Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky

Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky is a widely respected physicist, science advisor and Stanford University professor. This energetic, unusually accessible scientist and administrator combines knowledge of high energy physics with detailed, first hand understanding of the technology of accelerators. In 1984, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center paid tribute to its retiring director with a two day "Pief-Fest." The diversity of participants from all ranks of university, laboratory and scientific life is emblematic of the range of Panofsky's contributions and reflect great affection for a man whose life has been so closely tied to the evolution of SLAC. In his opening tribute, theoretical physicist and laboratory colleague Sidney Drell noted:

I am amazed at the invariance principles that characterize all of Pief's actions and interactions. His optimism, his warmth, his patience, his integrity, his kindness, his courage, and his persistence -- like the gravitational constant or the fine structure constant -- haven't wavered or altered one bit during all these years. Neither have his clothes or his geometry. He has also pioneered the building of beautiful machines and created a great laboratory -- immodestly perhaps considered here the greatest high energy lab; he has been an inspired and inspiring teacher, and throughout his career has devoted himself unselfishly to effective, wise and innumerable contributions to science policy and budgetary considerations in Washington, and to improved international collaboration in science and the free flow of scientists and science across national and ideological boundaries.

Early Years
Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1919, Wolfgang Panofsky spent his first fifteen years in Hamburg. Panofsky grew up amid the "typical" middle class intellectual life of the University of Hamburg where his father, Erwin, was professor of Art History and contributed to the work of the Kunsthalle, or Art museum. The Panofsky home was filled with academic discussions of art and scholarship, and with growing concern at the rise of Nazism. With Hitler's rise to power, German universities were targeted as sources of dissent, and the first dismissals of Jewish professors were announced in the spring of 1933. Within a year, Professor Panofsky took advantage of two offers from the United States where he had earlier served as a visiting professor. Accepting both positions, at New York University and at Princeton University, he moved the family to Princeton, New Jersey. In the fall of 1934, fifteen year old Wolfgang Panofsky and his sixteen year old brother entered Princeton University rather than undertake the more socially disruptive task of entering an American high school program. He quickly settled into university life, choosing physics, mathematics and Latin courses because they involved little written work in English. Just as quickly, he settled into American life. Learning how to drive, he spent his first summer traveling around the United States with his brother and a friend in a very un-European fashion-- in a '26 Buick simply "to see the country." The Princeton physics department of the 1930's was small, with little exposure of undergraduates to nuclear physics. Panofsky gained invaluable shop experience, however, working in a small room in the basement of the physics building to build a high pressure ionization chamber and an electrometer circuit to measure radioactive isotopes produced by the new cyclotron. Winding transformers and learning precision shop work, he learned "to get my hands dirty." His interest ranged freely, but the classic problems of electrodynamics caught his attention. During his second summer, he worked at the R.C.A. radio tube plant in Harrison, New Jersey, with Princeton friend Ray Emrich, now a retired Lehigh University professor. From this work, he wrote his first scientific paper: the relative importance of conduction to emission for oxide-coated cathodes. Following a junior year research paper on the vibration of a piano string, he completed his senior thesis with Professor Walker Bleakney on the behavior of high pressure ionization chambers and their saturation characteristics. Graduating with his B.S. from Princeton in 1938, young Panofsky was encouraged by his professors to apply to graduate school. He narrowed his choices to Columbia and the California Institute of Technology, influenced not only by their fellowship possibilities but by an interview with Isadore Rabi in New York and a long letter from Robert Millikan telling him about life at Caltech. Panofsky's choice ultimately was based on his sense of adventure. New York city life held few attractions compared to far off California. "It was not in any way whatever related to the particular subject of research," he later commented. "I didn't have the slightest idea of what I was going to work on...I didn't even know who was on the faculty other than Millikan." At Caltech, Panofsky balanced a heavy course load with teaching. On a "crash basis," Panofsky and Carl Anderson wrote a textbook on electricity and optics for sophomores to replace an out-of-date Millikan text. Although never published, this text was used throughout the war years at Caltech by other teaching assistants. Nuclear physics remained a distant field. Although he took one class with C. C. Lauritsen and attempted a course with J. Robert Oppenheimer, he viewed himself as "an x-ray guy." By his second year, he was a regular member of the first floor laboratory of Jesse DuMond. Panofsky was impressed by DuMond's insistence that a good physicist must be able to do everything himself from scratch. "One of the main things -- sort of the main principle of the Lab -- was not to depend on anybody else for anything that goes into your final data." A man of his generation, DuMond knew little about electronics, however. Panofsky was converted from casual visitor to DuMond student and laboratory regular after showing his usefulness by building a complicated regulator to keep the voltage stable on an x-ray tube. He then worked on the shielding and alignment of a two-crystal spectrometer, and coaxed the big x-ray tube into operation. Panofsky inherited a very complicated interlocking experiment and apparatus. DuMond had designed it with hardware accumulated over many generations of graduate students, but Panofsky was faced with a complexity of interacting, high-precision components scattered all over the building, a high voltage power supply, delicate crystal spectrometers, a variety of problems with shielding, precision measurements, and poor vacuum. From this he was not only to carefully regulate and operate the machinery but also to derive data, by iterative method, out of the actual observed x-ray yields and spectra. It had to work right, with no weak links, and it had to work with little reliance on DuMond who, with the United States entry into the war, was in Washington D.C. much of the time. The result was not only his thesis, but an extraordinary experience in managing a complex experiment that required knowledge of both technical and theoretical aspects. In 1942, Panofsky received his Ph.D. from Caltech, and that same year he married Adele DuMond. He also found himself designated an "enemy alien" under California's new Enemy Exclusion Act. Although the act clearly was aimed at Californians of Japanese descent, it also included all Italians and Germans. Panofsky was required to register and to be home before curfew, and could not go more than five miles from his residence even though his "residence" (Caltech) was the site of classified military research. In addition to his ongoing research with DuMond, Panofsky taught classical mechanics and electronics to military personnel during evening (post-curfew) extension classes. Wending his way through variety of special clearances and, eventually, his naturalization as an American citizen expedited by Millikan, Panofsky sensed the insecurity of wondering who, after the Japanese, would next be interned or evicted from California. During the remaining years of the Second World War, Panofsky worked on various military problems. In 1942, DuMond received National Defense Research Council funding first to develop a precision aerial camera for tracking moving targets and later on a "firing error indicator" for measuring the proximity of bullets to targets. DuMond quickly drew in Panofsky. Once again in charge of the actual project, Panofsky mapped several full scale experimental test runs and completed the government reports as well as the main scientific publications. Luis Alvarez read those reports and in 1943 asked Panofsky to serve as a consultant to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Working largely from Caltech, Panofsky became a consultant to the Manhattan project and developed an acoustic firing error indicator (or shock wave calibrator) for Alvarez. These devices were used in combat to determine the yields of the Hiroshima and Nagazaki bombs. Panofsky observed the first "Trinity" nuclear explosion from a B-29 at a distance of 10,000 feet from the event.

Berkeley And The Radiation Laboratory
Panofsky first became acquainted with Alvarez's interest in linear accelerators while working with him on the Los Alamos project. After the war, Alvarez gathered together a team at the University of California's Radiation Laboratory to build the proton linear accelerator out of surplus radar sets and offered a research assistantship to Panofsky. Although tempted by an offer from Bell Labs, Panofsky chose to stay on the West Coast. He took a chance on the non-academic position at the Berkeley Rad Lab where the Alvarez group would include Frank Oppenheimer, H. Bradner, Larry Johnson, John Woodyard, C. M. Turner and others. Alvarez was impressed at how quickly Panofsky picked up knowledge about cavities and wave guides. "He had no contact with microwave radio during the war," Alvarez wrote to Physics Department chairman Raymond Birge, "but he's now giving a lecture course on the theoretical and practical aspects of that field, and I'm with him a good part of each day, and I haven't the slightest idea where he finds the time..." Birge was looking for good men to teach physics. The majority of tenured physics faculty at Berkeley were attached to the Radiation Lab and supported by outside funds, with little or no teaching responsibilities on campus. When Birge found Panofsky available at 8 a.m. to teach, he offered him a faculty position as assistant professor of physics (June 1946). Otherwise little involved in campus affairs at that time, Panofsky took his teaching seriously. His first course was a three-unit class in electrodynamics where he again discovered textbook problems, this time a second volume of a text available only in German. Panofsky first wrote a mimeographed textbook which he used in graduate courses. When colleagues expressed interest in a published version, at the suggestion of E. U. Condon he collaborated with Melba Phillips, an expert in electrodynamics, to write and publish Classical Electricity and Magnetism. Panofsky was promoted to associate professor in the Physics Department in 1948. Harkening back to the teachings of DuMond, Panofsky maintained a holistic and hands-on approach. "Physics is the whole thing, which hopefully incorporates as much understanding as one can of the instruments which one uses," he later noted when speaking of this period. Panofsky's ability to organize complex scientific operations was put to good use. While working on high power RF problems and obit theory, he also served as a coordinating deputy to get things done on a day to day basis including overseeing shop work, supervising operators, fixing the machine and working with the engineers on additional design work. Panofsky was called on to do design work on the Bevatron and the electron synchrotron, and from late 1949 into 1950 designed and built the linear accelerator componants for E. O. Lawrence's controversial "Materials Testing Accelerator" (MTA) project. Panofsky enjoyed the sense of excitement at Berkeley and took good advantage of the array of machines available. Within the larger laboratory organization, there were no organized experimental groups, "no trappings of organized life," but rather 'the Alvarez principle,' that is "as reward for having built machines, any physicist should have opportunity to do experiments. The concept of an experimental group as it now prevails simply wasn't in existence. So, we were simply physicists, and I was an assistant professor, and there were graduate students, and the graduate students then, as they do now, had to sign up and work for somebody." Panofsky focused on a series of experiments to uncover the fundamental nature of the pi-meson and, in another series of tests, to probe the connections between these pi-mesons and the electromagnetic field. With Lee Aamodt and Jim Hadley, he produced key experiments analyzing the the products of gamma-ray absorption in hydrogen and deuterium which determined the parity of the pi mesons, showed that neutral pi's were lighter than charged pi's and determined accurate pion masses," introducing the term "Panofsky ratio" into the literature. He collaborated with Jack Steinberger to identify the neutral pi's produced in the electron synchrotron by observing the two decay gamma-rays in coincidence and worked later with H. F. York on the cyclotron. Additional papers resulted from his work with graduate students R. Phillips, Vincent Peterson, and E. A. Martinelli on the 184" cyclotron on neutral and charged mesons, with Vincent Peterson on pi production by protons, and with Sue-Gray Al-Salam on meson-induced fission. He also did a precision experiment on electromagnetic shower propagation and on proton-proton scattering at 32 MeV,using the Alvarez accelerator. His accomplishments as an experimental physicist led to job offers from Columbia, Princeton and Harvard. Berkeley, however, provided the opportunity to combine particle physics with engineering design and instrumentation. Despite the scientific excitement, the campus climate changed dramatically in 1951. The University of California became embroiled in a faculty-administration confrontation when the state's conservative legislature and Board of Regents insisted that an oath of loyalty be required of all university staff. The issue soon moved from one of loyalty to the United States to the obligation of faculty to obey the Regents. Many faculty protested on the basis of non-consultation rather than substance but some also objected to its explicit intolerance. Having endured the intrusive red-tape required for war-time naturalization and security clearances, Panofsky joined other Rad Lab scientists in signing the oath. "The Rad Lab by and large was not what you might call the hotbed of protest," Panofsky later noted. He well understood, however, the objections of other faculty, particularly those who had experienced European fascism. He insisted that rights of non-signers be respected and viewed dismissal of non-signers as a violation "of all that is true about academic freedom and tradition in the European sense." Although reluctant to leave Berkeley, he decided he must resign on principle. "People such as I, who had been born in Europe, were more sensitive to a loyalty oath requirement because such an oath had been used as a tool by European dictators." If the moral objections of these professors were not to be respected, Panofsky felt he could not stay. Panofsky's decision to move across the bay to Stanford University rather than to take up an offer from Columbia or Princeton no doubt surprised many. Alvarez tried to dissuade him, convinced that little or no decent physics could be done with Stanford's electron linear accelerator and that the move to Stanford would blight Panofsky's future in physics. Panofsky, in fact, knew little about the Stanford physics program, only that the Mark III electron accelerator program on campus was beginning to work, and that several noted Stanford physicists had an interest in nuclear physics but were not inclined to become too closely involved in accelerator development. But Stanford offered a number of clear advantages: "Firstly, we loved California." He, Adele, and their four children, did not want to leave the West coast. "Secondly, I really didn't want to go...so I didn't have to go very far, and in fact, one could sort of go gradually." Equally important, he liked the people at Stanford and they liked him. Unlike the other offers, the Stanford challenge was aimed specifically at Panofsky as a physicist who knew the technical, scientific and organizational needs of an ambitious but faltering program. He decided "what the devil, physics is physics, and one can essentially do it anywhere." But, he later admitted, "I certainly had no confidence either that much physics could be done here."

"The Tribe Across The Bay": Stanford University
When Panofsky arrived at Stanford, he faced a heavy teaching schedule and what turned out to be a "fairly sick" accelerator. Physics Department tradition, strongly supported by the department's senior members, expected faculty to teach four to five quarters of lower division and graduate courses a year along with relevant lab sections. Panofsky's courses were very popular among undergraduates and graduates alike, known for clear and engaging lectures as well as demanding requirements. His attention soon turned to the struggling Mark III program. Stanford's first linear accelerators were built under the direction of the highly respected physicist William W. Hansen and were intended to serve as research tools for Stanford's physicists. Following Hansen's untimely death in 1949, the Mark III was completed under the guidance of applied physicist Edward Ginzton, an expert in microwave technology. It began limited operation in 1951. In order to attain the projected energy of 1 GeV, the accelerator was extended to a longer length than was originally intended. Once this phase was completed in 1952, the accelerator itself reached some six inches short of the wall of the building with no room for experimental apparatus. Ginzton shifted from accelerator development to work on military contracts for microwave tube development. Bob Kyhl, microwave specialist in charge of the machine, was bogged down with difficult klystron performance and vacuum problems. Prof. Robert Hofstadter, the only faculty member then conducting research with the Mark III (at its half-way point), was determined not to get sidetracked with accelerator development. Panofsky designed an end-station for experimental work which was linked to the end of the accelerator by a "beam switchyard" which would transmit beams at a selected energy into the end station. By 1953, Panofsky and Ginzton worked out an organizational solution: to revitalize and reorganize the research and development programs, they created the umbrella W. W. Hansen Laboratories of Physics, under which Ginzton, as director of the Microwave Laboratory, would share shops and administration with Panofsky's High Energy Physics Laboratory. Ginzton's group concentrated on klystron development and Panofsky's took primary responsibility for particle physics research, coming together to collaborate on accelerator development. By the end of 1953, the Mark III was 220 feet long, producing 400 MeV, and serving as the source for a series of experiments. As the decade progressed, significant contributions were made at HEPL. In 1954, Stanford Medical School cancer specialist Henry Kaplan began his initial studies of electron therapy of cancer. Hofstadter's experiments to establish the electromagnetic dimensions of the proton and the neutron, and of heavier nuclei earned him a Nobel Prize in 1961. Meanwhile, additional landmark experiments were conducted in inelastic electron scattering and the electromagnetic behavior of muons and pions. Panofsky carried out a number of these experiments with graduate students. Among these were the first observations of muon-pairs produced by photons, the determination of the form-factor (ie. the size) of the excited state of the proton, and measurement of the radiation length in hydrogen.

Project "M" And SLAC
By mid-decade, with Stanford's high energy physics program well underway, Hofstadter, Panofsky, Ginzton and a number of their colleagues saw the need for an even larger, fourth generation machine. Following on Hansen's prototypes, Panofsky and Ginzton took leading roles in the development of a plan to build a two mile accelerator -- 30 times larger than the Mark III -- on the Stanford Campus. "Project M" (for "the Monster") was born in April 1956 when a group of Stanford physicists gathered at Panofsky's home to discuss the possibilities and implications of a more powerful linear accelerator. In addition to their campus responsibilities, Ginzton was named director of the Project with Panofsky as deputy director. Difficulties proved to be social as well as technical on both the local and national levels. The first controversy arose as Panofsky and Ginzton asserted that to justify major federal funding, the project had to be designed as a national facility open to all scientists, without preference given to Stanford physicists. While it was generally recognized that a machine of this magnitude could no longer be constructed on university funds and small national grants, some department faculty were concerned about the implications of open access to non-Stanford scientists: would they lose access for their own experiments? An added technical twist suggested the need for a strong, in-house team of high energy physicists. The high intensity and low duty cycle of the electron machine, in Panofsky's view, required a "facility-centered" experimental program rather than a "user-centered" one:

This group would have to put a large part of its scientific skills and careers "on the line" to design the equipment for exploiting the electron beam once it became a reality. The leaders of this research staff therefore had to be regular members of the Stanford University faculty, because attracting the necessary talent would only be possible if the leadership were composed of 'first-class citizens" on campus.

In a rare feat of academic tight-rope walking, Stanford convinced the Atomic Energy Commission and the outside physics community that full and equitable access to the facility would be provided while assuring the Stanford community "that the Monster was not a threat to regular academic values" and would not overwhelm existing university administrative machinery. To address the Physics Department's fear of an imbalance of high energy physicists (with few departmental responsibilities) to the disadvantage of Stanford physicists in other subfields, an uneasy compromise was created: the program as a whole was designed to operate under general university policy, with the participation of its in-house faculty in university affairs, but its operation would be autonomous and in accordance with Stanford University's contract with the AEC (now the Department of Energy.) A different kind of battle was waged with the U.S. government over what Panofsky, backed by Stanford's president J. E. Wallace Sterling and the Stanford Board of Trustees, deemed a principle of academic values. While traditional AEC contracts included a stipulation that the Government could impose security requirements on an open-ended basis, Panofsky was not interested in promoting classified research at the facility. He rejected outright the imposition of security regulations as a contractual obligation. With five years work and a $114 million contract on the table, he went against the advice of much of the physics community to oppose security restrictions. The AEC backed down, and an idiosyncratic contract regarding open access to facilities and the results of SLAC research was signed by the University and the AEC. Similarly, Stanford was granted responsibility for all facets of contributions to the new laboratory. In 1960, after Ginzton had stepped down as project director to assume leadership of the microwave development company Varian Associates, Panofsky took over as director of the newly named Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Following several rounds of congressional hearings in which the major objections were political rather than scientific, the Stanford project was authorized by the U.S. Congress in 1961. When the Project was initiated, Panofsky later noted, "we were fully aware of the fact that the SLAC machine was a maverick in the then-prevalent pattern of US high-energy physics." In short, few American physicists were interested in electron machines. However, since the annual federal budget for science was growing rapidly and competition was minimal, the physics community acquiesced for the most part on the assumption that the Stanford Linac would provide little threat to the major proton projects underway. The story of SLAC's construction is well documented in SLAC's "Blue Book." Between groundbreaking in July 1962 and acceleration of the first full-energy beam over the entire two mile length of the linac in 1966, Panofsky created not only a physical setting but a community of physicists, engineers, technicians, and support staff. As director in this as in previous projects, Panofsky was known for his accessibility and creative conflict resolution. "His patience and energy never seem exhausted; he has led with candor, with an innate ability to resolve conflicts constructively and by being creatively involved in every aspect of the Labs activities," commented his colleague and deputy director, Sidney Drell. "He has created an organization whose spirit and lively intellectual atmosphere have nurtured individual creativity. Indeed, the style and spirit of SLAC are truly a reflection of his own personality." Over the next 23 years, Panofsky supervised the design and construction of SLAC and the development of its physics program and its operation. He oversaw its research programs for both fixed target and colliding beam experiments and directed efforts for development of the Stanford Positron Electron Asymmetric Ring (SPEAR), the Positron-Electron Project (PEP) and initial work on the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC.) While SLAC physicists and engineers extended the boundaries of high energy physics, they also manufactured much of the often complicated machinery needed for the new techniques. Panofsky sought a strong, in-house team of physicists, engineers, and technicians. As a result, SLAC developed machine shops and assembly facilities, sophisticated instruments, and a highly respected engineering staff. Panofsky noted: "The wisdom of having a full capability across a full spectrum of technology has been shown repeatedly. Had we not been able to complete projects when industry could not, we would have had major setbacks." Counter to the pessimists of the early 1960's, SLAC was at the center of new discoveries in high energy physics, placing a new importance on electron physics. Early experiments at SLAC on inelastic electron scattering were the first to point to the substructure within the proton -- the "seeds" that eventually came to be identified as the basic quark building blocks of matter. The work done at the SPEAR storage ring during the 1970's included the discovery of the J/psi particle - leading to the confirmation of the fourth kind of quark ("charm") - and the discovery of the third kind of charged lepton (the tau), believed to be two of the fundamental building blocks of matter. SLAC has been instrumental in providing the experimental evidence for the present paradigm in its field: the "Standard Model" of leptons and quarks and the forces that act among them. By the time Panofsky retired as director in 1984, he could log two Nobel Prize earned "on his watch," along with numerous other prizes for research undertaken at SLAC. "The SLAC facility," he noted with pride in his resignation letter, "is recognized as second to none in experimental physics, particle theory and collider technology." That year, he passed leadership of the Center, with some 1200 employees and an annual budget of $80 million excluding construction, to Burton Richter, SLAC's current director.

Science And Society
Panofsky's interest in arms control and the social implications of scientific development first surfaced as a concern for public education. As a young Berkeley professor, he gave public talks to a wide range of groups (from the League of Women Voters to the San Francisco Plumbers Union) about the significance of atomic weapons and the changing nature of warfare. "In retrospect," he later commented "it was a very naive approach to this very complex problem...I gave them factual information, what it was all about, about the history of the Manhattan Project, about what made the difference between nuclear energy and other forms of energy." Beyond the facts, however, his motivation was "to get public sentiment for some kind of control on an international scale." His understanding of the complex nature of international affairs and human relations evolved over the next three decades as he served as advisor to many government agencies and administrations, including the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and as a member of the General Advisory Committee on Arms Control under President Carter. As chairman of the 1959 State Department "Technical Working Group on High Altitude Detection of Nuclear Explosives," he played a prominent role in negotiations with the Soviets that later resulted in the signing of an atmospheric test ban treaty during the Kennedy administration. As high energy physicist and arms control expert, Panofsky also was called on as a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission, the US Air Force, and the National Science Foundation. In 1970, his ongoing interest in arms control brought him together with other Stanford professors to found the University's Center for International Security and Arms Control. Panofsky is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A fellow of the American Physical Society, he served as its vice-president in 1973 and took office as President in 1974. From 1967 to 1970 he was a member of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP). A member of the Board of Overseers of the Universities Research Association for the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory (SSC) in Texas since 1984, Panofsky served as Chairman of the Board from 1985 to 1993. In 1985, he also was appointed Chairman of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences (CISAC), a committee on which he has served since 1981. He also enjoys the dubious honor of being one of only two physicists to be profiled by Playboy Magazine. The various awards and citations Panofsky has received reveal something of the breadth of his accomplishments as well as the deep respect he has earned from diverse communities. He received the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's E. O. Lawrence Award in 1961 (for his fundamental contributions to meson physics and on detection of nuclear explosions in space); the Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1970 ("particularly for accelerator design, construction and successful exploitation"); the Leo Szilard Award of the American Physical Society in 1982 (for his contributions to society through his arms control work); Harvard's Loeb Lecturer; and the Richtmeyer Lecturer by the American Association of Physics Teachers; California Scientist of the Year by the California Academy of Sciences in 1967; the National Medal of Science in 1969; and the Enrico Fermi Award in 1979 (for his contributions to elementary physics and accelerator physics, for his inspiration to younger scientists, and "for the depth and thoughtfulness of advice he has so generously given the United States Government"). Perhaps the most eloquent citation is the following, from the text of Panofsky's 1983 honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Princeton University:

He has led our quest for the ultimate constituents of inanimate nature, using the resources of modern technology to open the realm of high-energy elementary particle physics and to catch glimpses of a fleeting world of 'color,' 'charm', and 'strangeness.' Knowing intimately the awesome power of the atom, he has counseled us in the arena of nuclear arms, soberly reminding us of the mutually assured destruction that is the most likely outcome of their use.

International recognition has also pointed to Panofsky's contributions both to science and international relations. Elected a member of L'Academie des Sciences (France) and an "officier" of the French Legion d'Honor (1977), he has received numerous honorary degrees. Three years after receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Hamburg (1984) for his work in high energy electron physics, Panofsky was awarded an honorary professorship from Beijing University for both his scientific accomplishments and his work for world peace. In 1989, he was elected one of only two Americans selected as foreign members of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now the Russian Academy of Sciences) for his scientific accomplishments in nuclear physics and, as Academy President G. I. Marchuk stated, on the hope that he could "further strengthen the relations between USSR and USA scientists." Panofsky has received many accolades for his contributions to science and public policy but closer to home he is a noted Stanford community citizen and leader. He played a key role in the formation of the Stanford Mid-Peninsula Urban Coalition and the Stanford Mid-Peninsula Citizens for Fair Housing, and was a co-founder of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Fund at Stanford shortly after Dr. King's death. Considered a sage as well as industrious member of the Stanford academic community, he has served on a wide variety of University committees, including the Academic Council's Advisory Board and its Committee on the Graduate Division, and on the University's Committee on Minority Affairs. As Laboratory professor emeritus and director emeritus, his open door policy, his fairness and sensitivity, his wit and honesty, and his personal commitment to human rights and affirmative action continue to be widely appreciated.