In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Lowell Klaisner, a longtime engineer and Chief of Operations at SLAC. Klaisner recounts his childhood in Northern California and his early interests in math and science. He describes his undergraduate and graduate experience at Stanford where he studied electrical engineering, and he discusses his work at Argonne, Fermilab, Eldec, and Hansen Labs. Klaisner provides a technical explanation of the engineering behind accelerator physics and he explains the circumstances leading to his employment at SLAC. He provides a broad overview of the many research projects he has been involved in at SLAC over the decades, and he gives perspective on the impact of the rise and fall of the SSC on high energy physics. At the end of the interview, Klaisner discusses the changing focus of SLAC in recent years and describes how it can remain central to major endeavors in physics in the future.
