Boleslaw Wyslouch steps down as director of Laboratory for Nuclear Science

After more than 10 years at the helm of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), Boleslaw “Bolek” Wyslouch will step down to continue research in nuclear physics as director of the Bates Research and Engineering Center, a subgroup of LNS.

“LNS scientists, including Bolek himself, are world leaders in particle and nuclear physics,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. “Bolek has ensured that LNS has flourished during his time as director, supporting our teams’ critical large-scale, international, collaborative research.”

The largest university-based program of its kind in the country, LNS was established in 1946 to provide support for basic research in the fields of nuclear and high-energy physics. Wyslouch has served as LNS director since 2015.

Since Bolek’s appointment as LNS director in 2015, he has helped significantly increase the Laboratory’s research volume. This growth reflects expansion across many areas of nuclear and particle physics, with LNS supporting several new faculty members. His vision was instrumental in bringing low-energy nuclear physics into the laboratory as a major new research area, the only subfield of nuclear physics in which the laboratory had not previously engaged.

“The leadership to inspire this capacity growth brought in young and vibrant faculty research groups, which helped lead to the expansion in LNS research volume,” says Rick Peterson, executive director of the lab. “Further, this new technical expertise facilitated new partnerships across the national laboratories, enabling LNS to develop and build a presence at all U.S.-based nuclear physics labs.” Most recently, LNS is engaged in an effort to compete for bids to the Department of Energy’s Genesis mission, a potential source of funding in the AI era. 

During his tenure, LNS saw the successful bid for the National Science Foundation-funded AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, led by LNS scientists and supporting more than 25 physics and AI senior researchers at MIT and Harvard, Northeastern, and Tufts universities. Last year, the Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP), part of LNS, also received a $20 million donation from the Leinweber Foundation to create a Leinweber Institute within CTP.

“Perhaps most importantly, Bolek led LNS toward a culture where each individual is valued for their own contributions, regardless of their status within a lab group,” says Peterson, adding that he developed new pathways for postdoc support and sponsored other community-building activities. 

At Bates, Bolek has led and overseen a wide range of complex engineering and scientific projects. These include the development of advanced particle detectors for major international research facilities such as CERN, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Jefferson Lab. Under his leadership, the laboratory established collaborations with industry partners on innovative technologies, including next-generation batteries, advanced accelerator systems, and medical applications of nuclear science. Through these efforts, the laboratory is helping advance both fundamental research and the development of technologies with broad scientific and societal impact.

In his own research, Wyslouch is one of the founders and leaders of the relativistic heavy ion program in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva.

Wyslouch studies the interactions between subatomic particles by looking at the very energetic collisions of heavy ions. The earliest runs of the LHC showed that hot plasma strongly suppressed production of high-energy jets, redistributing the jet energy among slow particles. Wyslouch’s CMS group further discovered surprisingly strong collective effects in ion-ion collisions, as well as in proton-proton and proton-ion collisions.

Before joining CMS, Wyslouch conducted high-energy and nuclear experiments at CERN and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider facility, and took a leadership role at Brookhaven in creating PHOBOS, a project designed to create and study a quark-gluon plasma.

After completing his undergraduate work in physics at the University of Warsaw, Poland, in 1981, Wyslouch began his association with MIT as a doctoral student, earning a PhD in physics in 1987. After postdoctoral appointments at LNS and CERN, he joined the MIT faculty in the Department of Physics in 1991. He has also served as the head of the Nuclear and Particle Physics Division of the Department of Physics since 2013. 

Wyslouch was recognized for his contribution to education at MIT with a 2004 William W. Buechner Teaching Prize. He was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013, and as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.