The CUA group organized the collaboration of institutions which took responsiblity for the design and construction of the Hall B Photon Tagger -- a device which makes possible the entire current program of approved experiments which use real photons as the nuclear probe. Dr. O'Brien has served as Co-chair of the Tagger Technical working group throughout the design and construction phases of this project. He currently serves as Archivist of the CLAS collaboration, and as the CUA representative on the Membership Committee.
Dr. O'Brien holds a full-time appointment as Professor of Physics & Engineering at Montgomery College -- a public, 2-year institution serving over 20,000 students/year on 3 campuses in nearby Montgomery County, Maryland. He became the 10th full-time faculty member to join what was then the Department of Physics & Geosciences on the Rockville Campus in 1970, and has over the years served in many capacities, including Department Chairman, as the department expanded to include responsibility for the transfer engineering program. He has been active on many College governance committees, serving for six years as Chair of the College-wide Advisory Committee for Academic Computing, and most recently on the Policy Committee for Distance Learning. He is a long time activist in the AAUP, which functions at MC as the faculty union for collective bargaining, including 2 terms as Chapter President and more than a dozen years as Newsletter Editor. In recent semesters he has served as Web advisor to the senior administrators, and currently chairs the Web Maintenance Team.
He has produced an extensive set of instructional
materials for laboratory exercises in the calculus-based engineering physics
courses, and recently revised the Sophomore-level numerical methods course
to shift from Fortran to Matlab as the principal language tool. He
manages the Department's large set of informational handouts for optimum
transfer into Bachelor's level engineering programs at upper-division institutions,
and has posted a great deal of this material on the MC web pages, for which
he is the Physics
Department's site manager.