Wanted -- great director for Brookhaven National Laboratory

The director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, like the leaders of all the national labs -- high-powered engines of innovation -- must have strong scientific credentials and vision, plus the ability to cope with the maddening ups and downs of the federal budget cycle. This immensely demanding job requires operational skill to keep the lab's big machines running and to help shape our region's economic future. It calls for smooth coordination with the other Long Island research institutions, to help produce the high-tech jobs of tomorrow.

So the search for a top-rank successor to the current director, Sam Aronson, who is stepping down later this year after a successful six-year run, will be crucial.

Aronson, 69, wants to lay down the administrative and budgetary burdens and get back to the high-end physics that he did for three decades at Brookhaven. In 2005, a year before he became director, he announced a major finding from BNL's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider: Right after the Big Bang, subatomic particles were not in a gaseous form, as scientists had believed, but more like a nearly perfect liquid.

On his watch, the lab has made major strides. In 2007 it opened the new Center for Functional Nanomaterials, to study objects down to a nanometer, a billionth of a meter. In 2009, the Department of Energy gave BNL final permission to build its next big machine, the new national synchrotron light source (NSLS II), which will provide the brightest light in the world, crucial for examining nanoscale objects. It's expected to open in 2014. The lab's new director will have to make the transition from the existing light source to NSLS II a smooth one for all the scientists who will use it. Aronson also presided over the opening of a huge new solar-panel array that provides power to the grid and will soon allow the lab to study the correlation between the passing clouds and the energy produced by the panels.

This year, the lab and Stony Brook University will compete to win for the Island a new national "energy innovation hub" for batteries and energy storage. Both BNL and Stony Brook, with its Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center, have deep battery expertise. Winning this Department of Energy hub designation would be a giant step toward making the region a major high-tech center. The lab is absolutely central to that goal.

Aronson has worked well with leaders of other key institutions, such as Stony Brook, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Hofstra University and the Long Island Association. They're key actors in Accelerate Long Island, a new collaboration designed to bring the region's research power together with venture capital to create new firms that will arise here, grow here and stay here. It's vital that Aronson's successor fit well into this developing regional science-business consortium.

Brookhaven Science Associates -- a 50-50 partnership of Stony Brook and Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit science and technology company -- runs the lab. And its board will pick the new director. For the sake of the region's prosperity and its place in future scientific research, the board must choose wisely and well.