wilson and mcdaniel continued to collaborate at cornell until wilson left to head fermilab in batavia, illinois in 1967. in 1972, wilson invited mcdaniel to serve as acting head of the accelerator section at fermilab, and mcdanield took a one-year leave of absence from cornell. though the fermilab accelerator had been placed into operation, it suffered from frequent component failures. when mcdaniel left eight months later, he led the effort which increased the power of fermilab's accelerator from 20 gev to 300 gev and its beam density by a factor of 1000. of mcdaniel's contribution to fermilab, wilson said, "this bravura performance demonstrated mac’s skill for leadership as well as his celebrated sixth sense for finding sources of trouble and fixing them.” upon returning to cornell in 1974, mcdaniel proposed upgrading the then existing 10 gev synchrotron with an 8 gev electron-positron storage ring, which would greatly increase the energy of particle collisions when the particles in the storage ring hit the particles traveling in the opposite direction in the synchrotron. when constructed in 1979, the cornell electron storage ring became the world's primary source of information about one of the fundamental building blocks of matter, the b-quark. after the end of particle physics experiments 20 years later, cesr is now used as a test facility of damping rings for a future international linear collider. in 1981, mcdaniel developed a proposal for a new mile-diameter electron-positron collider called cser ii, but could not obtain the necessary $200 million in funding for it. in 1988, mcdaniel was visiting distinguished professor at arizona state university.