Robert R. Wilson (1914-2000), American physicist. In World War II he spent 3 years at Los Alamos as part of the theory team on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Wilson was one of the pioneers of electron synchrotrons at Cornell University in the 1950s. He was the founder and first director (1967-1978) of Fermilab, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, which he made into one of the world's leading particle physics laboratories. He is seen at the groundbreaking for Fermilab's Main Ring accelerator in 1969.