Nicholas P. Samios (born March 15, 1932, in NYC) is an American physicist and former director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York.
He worked on the Columbia faculty for three years before joining Brookhaven's physics department, where he was appointed laboratory director in May 1982.
[2] A major achievement of his tenure was the construction of the RHIC, the first heavy-ion collider.
[3] He stepped down as director in 1997 after a dispute on leaked radioactivity in the laboratory, but continued to work as a researcher.
He is especially known for his study of elementary particles, in particular for the discovery of the Omega minus particle in 1964 as postulated by Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman, as well as the first charmed baryon.