mcdaniel was one of many manhanttan project researchers to join the cornell faculty after the war. he became an assistant professor in 1946 and became a full professor in 1955. with his ph.d. student robert walker, he invented the pair spectrometer, a device that measures gamma ray energies. he was a co-founder of cornell's laboratory for nuclear studies (lns) and had helped create the 300 megavolt (mev) electron synchrotron, one of the first such accelerators in the world. he and wilson, who was mcdaniel's predecessor as director of lns, built three more electron synchrotrons of 1 gev, 2 gev, and 10 gev, each of which enabled physicists to study phenomena in a new energy range. mcdaniel quickly earned a reputation as a hands-on designer as indicated by this episode in the construction of the 300 mev synchrotron: