Sam Aronson earned an A.B. in physics from Columbia University in 1964, and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1968. From 1968 to 1972, he worked at the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies as a research associate. He then moved to the University of Wisconsin until 1977. Aronson joined Brookhaven Lab’s Accelerator Department in 1978, and was named physicist in 1979. He moved to the Physics Department in 1982, and was appointed deputy chair in 1988. In 1991, Aronson became head of the PHENIX detector project during construction of the Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a challenge he successfully completed before he became chair of Physics in 2001. He became Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear and Particle Physics in 2005 and Laboratory Director in 2006. Aronson is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.