On April 28th, UF Physics celebrated the retirements of Professors Paul Avery and Pierre Ramond with over seventy colleagues and friends at the Sweetwater Branch Inn in Gainesville.
Pierre Ramond arrived at the University of Florida in 1980 as one of a group of young Full Professors recruited to found a particle physics theory group. Ramond’s honors include the Dirac Medal and becoming a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also served the University as Chair of the Faculty Sentate.
Paul Avery arrived in 1985 as an Assistant Professor working first as part of the CLEO Collaboration at Cornell University, and later with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration in Geneva. Avery became a national expert in grid computing as Principle Investigator for a series of initiatives. His leadership led the University of Florida to become a major site of the Open Science Grid as well as a Tier-2 site for worldwide computing on CMS.
At the retirement event, Professor Ramond received a gift of a series of original 19th Century maps of Paris showing the development of the city of his birth. Professor Avery received an engraved plaque made out of a disk that was taken from the 1986 Decstation that was the first big computer he bought for his group when he first came to the University of Florida.
Remarkably, both retiring faculty were selected as a University of Florida’s Teacher/Scholar of the Year, an honor bestowed on only one faculty member each year in the entire university.
