Edwin Goldwasser, a physicist who co-founded the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and helped build one of the world’s most powerful particle accelerators, died on Dec. 14 at his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 97.

His death was confirmed by his niece Ruth W. Messinger, the former Manhattan borough president.

Dr. Goldwasser, who was long associated with the University of Illinois, helped pioneer the use of powerful particle accelerators in American physics. By smashing subatomic particles together at high energies, the machines deepen scientists’ understanding of the most fundamental aspects of nature.

He was named deputy director of what was then the National Accelerator Laboratory in 1967 and given the task of constructing the most powerful accelerator in the world on farmland outside Chicago. The lab, which would later be known as Fermilab after the physicist Enrico Fermi, began operations in 1972.

“His biggest impact was Fermilab — creating the most forward-looking laboratory of its day in the United States,” said Barry Barish, a physicist who performed experiments in the early days of Fermilab before becoming the director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.