Stan’s employment at Brookhaven is recorded in the lab’s annual and quarterly reports

Stan’s employment at Brookhaven is recorded in the lab’s annual and quarterly reports

• Jan 17, 2022
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Under the terms of its contract with the Atomic Energy Commission, Associated Universities, Inc. produced annual reports of research operations at Brookhaven National Laboratory each year beginning in 1948. 

Helpfully, staff members are listed for each of the laboratory's departments, including those on leave or on assignment from a member university. Also, scientific papers reporting on work performed at the lab are cited in the annual reports, and also in separate quarterly filings. 

These reports are helpful for pinning down the dates of Stan's tenure at Brookhaven, and we also learn more about the career of Stan's collaborator Brice Rustad. 

The important annual report turns out to be BNL-196, covering the 12 months from July 1951 through June 1952. Stan is listed twice in staff directories in this report—as Stanley Ruby in the Chemistry Department, for the year ending June 31, 1952, and as Stanley L. Ruby in the Physics Department for the next year. 

In addition, Stan is listed as an author on two papers. One is the February 15 Physical Review letter with Rustad that we have been tracking, but the second is for a conference paper on the same topic given at the January 1953 American Physical Society meeting in Cambridge, Mass.

So we can add a new fact to our timeline—Stan’s first APS presentation and a trip to Boston that we hadn’t known about.

Another new data point comes from the Q3 1951 quarterly progress report. There we find a full write up by Stanley Ruby (no initial), R.C. Andersen and M.D. Hassialis on "Adsorption of Xanthates on Mineral Surfaces." So this seems to be the main result of Stan’s year in the Chemistry Department at Brookhaven. The subject is closely related to the 1954 dissertation by Stanley Ruby.

In the 1953 annual report, Stanley L. Ruby is listed as a graduate student in the Physics Department on assignment from Columbia University. An asterisk gives a “termination” date of June 31, 1953. Termination here means that his assignment ended on that date, not that he was discharged for cause.

Presumably, that is because his funding for graduate research had reached an end. After two years at Brookhaven, with his research complete but a dissertation still to write, it was time to leave the nest, perhaps to a post-doctoral appointment somewhere else or to a real job in industry.

As we know, he took the latter course and accepted a position with the IBM Corporation in Endicott, N.Y. Now we have a date and an explanation for that event.

When I was sharing some of this new information with Joanne, she asked a natural question. Are we sure that there was not a second Stanley Ruby? I’ll answer that next.