Beckman Institute faculty member Lillian Hoddeson has won a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy for a study called "The Decline and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider."

Hoddeson, a Professor of History and the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science at Illinois, will collaborate with Michael Riordan from the University of California in Santa Cruz on the study. The Superconducting Super Collider project, planned as the largest particle accelerator in the world, was funded by Congress in the late 1980s and later cancelled. Hoddeson's project will analyze the dynamics of how what would have become the largest scientific research project ever was cancelled from a "Big Science" point of view.