Bethe arrived in the United States in February 1935, and joined the faculty at Cornell University on a salary of $3,000. Bethe's appointment was part of a deliberate effort on the part of the new head of its physics department, Roswell Clifton Gibbs, to move into nuclear physics. Gibbs had hired Stanley Livingston, who had worked with Ernest Lawrence, to build a cyclotron at Cornell. To complete the team, Cornell needed an experimentalist, and, on the advice of Bethe and Livingston, recruited Robert Bacher. Bethe received requests to visit Columbia University from Isidor Isaac Rabi, Princeton University from Edward Condon, University of Rochester from Lee DuBridge, Purdue University from Karl Lark-Horovitz, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from Francis Wheeler Loomis, and Harvard University from John Hasbrouck Van Vleck. Gibbs moved to prevent Bethe from being poached by having him appointed as a regular assistant professor in 1936, with an assurance that promotion to professor would soon follow.