John S. Toll

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John S. Toll is a physicist and well-known educational administrator.

He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Yale in 1944, after which he served in the Navy in World War II. He finished his Ph.D. in physics at Princeton in 1952.

He then moved to the University of Maryland, where he became Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy in 1953. During his tenure as Chair, he was responsible for a major increase in size and quality of the department. The physics building at the University of Maryland is named for him.

In 1965 he left to become the first President of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, a position he held until 1978. While he was there, SUNY-Stony Brook grew from 1,800 students to 17,000 students.

He then returned to the University of Maryland to become President of the University. At the time, this position put him in charge of five different campuses. When governor Donald Schaefer decided to merge the state's public universities into a single system, Toll was put in charge of the merger. He then became the first Chancellor of the new University System of Maryland.

In 1995, at age 71, he became President of Washington College, a small private liberal arts school. There, he was credited with fixing the school's budget crisis and significantly raising its national profile.

As a physicist, Toll is known for his work in dispersion theory and elementary particle physics. In January 2004, he announced that he would leave Washington College and return to physics research at the University of Maryland. He is married to the former Deborah Taintor. Together, they have two grown daughters.

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