What Matters to Me & Why - Sidney and Persis Drell

The purpose of What Matters to Me and Why is to encourage reflection within the Stanford community on matters of personal values, beliefs, and motivations in order to better understand the lives and inspirations of those who shape the University.

This final installation of What Matters to Me and Why for the academic year features father and daughter, Sidney and Persis Drell.

Sidney Drell, Professor and Deputy Director at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Emeritus and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Hoover Institution

Sidney D. Drell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a professor of theoretical physics emeritus at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where he served as deputy director until retiring in 1998. An arms control specialist, he has advised the executive and legislative branches of government on national security and technical defense issues for more than five decades. From 1983 to 1989, he was the founding codirector of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Persis Drell, Frederick Emmons Terman Dean of the Stanford School of Engineering, the James and Anna Marie Spilker Professor in the School of Engineering and a professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Physics

Dean Persis Drell, who assumed her current post in September 2014, has been on the faculty at Stanford since 2002 and was director of the 1,600-employee U.S. Department of Energy SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from 2007 to 2012. Her research interests are in technology development for free electron lasers and particle astrophysics. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society. Dean Drell has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award. She received her bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Wellesley College and her doctorate in atomic physics from the University of California, Berkeley.