Taking the helm: John Hill will oversee Brookhaven’s $900m annual budget. (Courtesy: Kevin Coughlin/Brookhaven National Laboratory) John Hill has become director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York, after serving as interim lab director since September. Hill will now oversee Brookhaven’s 3000-strong team of scientists, engineers and technicians as well as manage the lab’s annual $900m budget. Brookhaven opened in 1947 as one of the first three US national labs, the others being Argonne and Oak Ridge. Brookhaven carries out a wide range of research in the physical, biomedical and environmental sciences and is home to seven Nobel-prize-winning discoveries. Brookhaven operated the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) until it shut down in February. RHIC collided heavy nuclei such as gold and copper to produce a quark-gluon plasma – a state of matter thought to have been present in the very early universe.…