October 24, 2005
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| IUCF Director Emeritus, Dr. John Cameron, receives Distinguished Faculty Award. |
Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences presented its prestigious Distinguished Faculty Award to Dr. John Cameron, Director Emeritus of IUCF, at its Annual Recognition Banquet on October 21 in the Indiana Memorial Union.
Dr. John Cameron was Director of IUCF from 1987 to 2004 and was instrumental in broadening the mission of IUCF from pure research to exploring innovative medical, technological and commercial applications in nuclear science. Under his leadership IUCF was noted for its pioneering research in the 1980s and 1990s, celebrating the first observation in the world of stable horizontal polarization in a storage ring using the Siberian snake (May 1989), and the first experiments producing reaction particles from an internal target using a cooled beam in the world (October 1989). During this time IUCF was a world leader in the use of polarized light ion beams for intermediate energy nuclear physics experiments and reported two new results for the observation of charge symmetry breaking in nuclear physics. In 1998, IUCF also began studies on the medical application of proton therapy for Age Related Macular Degeneration, and when the NSF terminated funding for the cyclotron in the same year, Dr Cameron led the initiative to acquire funding to build the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute. Embedded in IUCF and using the proton beam generated by IUCF’s mainstage accelerator, the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute began treating cancer patients in 2004.
John Cameron was born in Ireland, and earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from Queen’s University in Belfast. He moved to the United States in 1963 and earned his master’s degree and doctorate from the University of California in Los Angeles. He has held teaching positions at the University of California, the University of Washington, and the University of Alberta. He has conducted research for the University de Paris-Sud, (France), TRIUMF (Vancouver), the Laboratoire National Saturne (France) and other major institutions. He was Director of the Nuclear Research Centre at the University of Alberta from 1985 to 1987, and was appointed Director of IUCF and Professor of Physics in 1987. He held the position until August 2004, and retired from Indiana University in June 2005. He is currently president of PartTec, Ltd. and ProCure, two Bloomington-based companies seeking to explore markets for proton therapy worldwide.
