The University of Washington is located
in Washington State, at the northwest corner of the "inner 48"
states of the United States of America and just south of the US-Canadian
border with British Columbia. (See
map.)
Seattle, in western Washington, is the largest city in the state and
has a population of about 700,000 in the city itself, with about 1.5 million
in the metropolitan area.
It is located on Puget Sound 
in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.A. Seattle (above the large horizontal
lake in the center of the above figure) is bounded by Lake Washington and
the Cascade Mountain Range (lower edge) to the east and Puget Sound and
the Olympic Mountain Range (upper left) to the west. Towering Mount Ranier
(lower left, alt. 14,100 ft.) is about 85 miles southeast of the city.
The University of Washington is located north of the city center and is bounded by Lake Washington and the Ship Canal that bisects the city. It has about 28,000 undergraduate students and about 8,000 graduate students. In 1992 it ranked 2nd among universities in the U.S.A. for total federal grant funding for research.
The U. W. Nuclear Physics Laboratory is a part of the Department of Physics, but is located in a separate building on a hillside overlooking Lake Washington, the Cascades, and Mount Ranier. It is one of four large campus-based nuclear physics laboratories supported by the U. S. Department of Energy. It operates a realtively new on-campus accelerator, a 20 megavolt-equivalent superconducting linac injected by a 9 megavolt Tandem Van de Graaff and also supports a vigorous program of user physics at various laboratories (including CERN).