Sam Aronson attributes his success in administration, in part, to a piece of fatherly advice. Even though Aronson was interested in science and engineering, his father suggested that a liberal arts undergraduate education would serve him well later in life. He took that advice, and went to Columbia College in Chicago, gaining a wide perspective of science's role in society, as well as a major in physics.

He then pursued a PhD in particle physics at Princeton University, detailing the properties of elementary particles called kaons. As a postdoc at the University of Chicago's Enrico Fermi Institute, he continued his kaon work, related to the observed imbalance between matter and antimatter.

Next, he accepted an assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin, but opportunities for tenure in the physics department were limited. Aronson turned down offers from other universities to go to Brookhaven National Laboratory — his most pivotal career move.

He was lured there in the late 1970s by the prospect of building ISABELLE, a proton collider. After several years, the project was cancelled in favour of the superconducting supercollider, but this was also ultimately cancelled. Meanwhile, Aronson was helping build new experiments to measure the elastic scattering of neutrinos at Brookhaven, while also assisting with the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab, which discovered the 'top' quark.

While deputy chair of the physics department at Brookhaven, Aronson helped design the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which uses heavy-ion collisions to study quarks and gluons at high temperatures. Aronson then moved to manage one of RHIC's detector construction projects, named PHENIX. “With RHIC, Brookhaven bounced back in a creative and spectacular way,” he says.

After 30 years at Brookhaven, Aronson has taken the helm as director. “We were looking for the perfect combination of researcher and administrator,” says Shirley Strum Kenny, Stony Brook University president and board chair of Brookhaven Science Associates, which operates the lab for the US Department of Energy.

Aronson will have to reposition Brookhaven's scientific agenda once RHIC faces competition from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. “We face financial, political and sociological challenges to realize our vision of conducting basic-energy and nuclear physics,” he says. “What I do now is not about hard science, but about managing science in a cultural and societal context.”