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Professor Andrew J. Lankford
Andrew J. Lankford is Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. His research involves experimental studies of fundamental particles and their interactions using colliding particle beams. At present, his studies are conducted with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, and focus on searches for signatures of new phenomena and particles. He is Fellow of the APS (2000) and National Associate of the NRC (2011). He has been active in leadership of particle physics research collaborations, serving at present as Deputy Spokesperson of the ATLAS Collaboration. He has frequently served on national laboratory and agency advisory and review panels concerning the fields of particle physics, nuclear physics, and cosmology. Professor Lankford has published more than 775 peer-reviewed journal articles. He received his PhD in Physics from Yale University in 1978 and held research positions at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center prior to joining the faculty at UC Irvine in 1990.
Karl van Bibber received his BS and PhD degrees from MIT. After postdoctoral work at LBNL, he served as an Assistant Professor of Physics at Stanford. He joined LLNL where he founded and led the High Energy Physics and Accelerator Technology Group, and was LLNL Project Leader for construction of the SLAC-LBNL-LLNL PEP-II B Factory project. His institutional service includes positions as Chief Scientist for the Physics and Space Technology directorate, and Deputy Director of the Laboratory Science and Technology Office. In 2009 he became Vice President and Dean of Research of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. In 2012 he joined the faculty of UC Berkeley as Professor of Nuclear Engineering, and acceded to Department Chair in July 2012. He also serves as Executive Director of the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium, a DOE Office of Non-Proliferation center-of-excellence comprised of seven universities and four national laboratories. His research focuses on basic and applied nuclear science, accelerator science and technology, and particle astrophysics, particularly dark matter axion searches. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the DOE Deputy Secretary Award for the B Factory, and the Navy Superior Civilian Service Award for the establishment of degree and executive education programs in Energy, the first within the DoD. He is a fellow of the APS and AAAS.
Professor James Buckley
Professor James Buckley is Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1994, then was a postdoctoral research associate at the Whipple observatory of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1993 to 1997 before joining the Physics department faculty at Washington University in 1997. Prof. Buckley is a recipient of the 1997 Shakti Duggal Award for cosmic ray research as well as a DOE outstanding junior investigator award in 1998. Buckley’s research interests include indirect and direct searches for dark matter, and the study of the high-energy universe through multiwavelength observations of active galaxies, pulsars, gamma-ray bursts and supernova remnants. Buckley is a coauthor of a number of papers on a range of subjects in astroparticle physics including 20 papers with more than 100 citations on topics ranging from the discovery of strong TeV gamma-ray flares from active galaxies, discovery of TeV emission from the Galactic Center, and gamma-ray observations that provide direct evidence for local acceleration of cosmic-ray nuclei in supernova remnants. Buckley has been active in the field of gamma-ray astrophysics beginning as a member of the Whipple gamma-ray group, a founding member of the VERITAS experiment, and a current member of the international CTA consortium. In addition to work in gamma-ray astrophysics, Buckley also works on the development of new types of photodetectors based on amorphous and epitaxial InGaN/AlGaN semiconductor structures. In collaboration with the WU computer science faculty, Buckley conducts research in computer science (as an adjunct faculty in the WU CSE department), designing heterogeneous (FPGA, CPU and GPU) computing frameworks aimed at improving throughput of pipelined processing of large astrophysical and biological data sets. Prof. Buckley is author of journal papers and review articles on the potential of gamma-ray measurements in the detection and identification of dark matter, and continues work as an active proponent of complementary searches for dark matter through a combination of both indirect and direct searches as a convener of the 2013 Snowmass high-energy-physics planning process.
Dr. Marcela Carena is the head of the theoretical physics department at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. She received her Diploma in Physics from the Instituto Balseiro of Bariloche, Argentina in 1985, and her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Hamburg in 1989. She was a John Stuart Bell Fellow at CERN from 1993-95, was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship in 1996, and she was a CERN staff member in 1999-2000. She has been a staff scientist at Fermilab since 1997 and a Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago since 2008, where she is both a member of the Enrico Fermi Institute and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. Her research explores the possible connections between Higgs physics, supersymmetry, unification, and dark matter. Carena works closely with experimental physicists, creating and implementing strategies for testing the latest ideas for the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking. In particular, her work focusses on exploring the implications of the Higgs Discovery for new physics ideas relevant for dark matter, the genesis of matter and the stability of our universe. Carena is the chair-elect of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society (APS). She is a former General Councilor and Executive Board member of the APS and has also served on the APS Committee on International Scientific Affairs, as well as the APS Lilienfeld and Sakurai Prize Selection Committees. She has served on two subpanels of the DOE/NSF High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP), and on scientific advisory panels in Germany, Brazil and Argentina. She chaired the advisory board of the interdisciplinary Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) in Santa Barbara. Carena has been a fellow of the American Physical Society since 2002. In 2010 she won a Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, and in 2013 she was a Simons Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Dr. Bruce Carlsten
Dr. Bruce Carlsten is a senior R&D Engineer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). He received his PhD from Stanford Univers ity in 1985 and a BS from UCLA in 1979. He was awarded the 1999 US Particle Accelerator School Prize for Achievement in Accelerator Physics and Technology and is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a regular instructor for the US Particle Accelerator School teaching graduate-level credit courses on RF sources and is a member of the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society Division of Physics of Beams as well as a member of the Advanced and Novel Accelerators Panel for the International Committee for Future Accelerators. His research focuses both on novel RF sources and on high-brightness electron beams and their applications, and specifically free-electron lasers (FELs). From 2005 to 2012 he lead the High-Power Electrodynamics group at LANL, overseeing the groups projects on FELs, high-power and high-frequency microwave sources and effects, and accelerator components. He is currently serves as chief scientist for LANL’s Navy-funded FEL project and directs the design efforts for the Laboratory’s future X-ray FEL, the MaRIE facility. He has built three research accelerator facilities, has published over 100 peer reviewed papers, and has six patents.
Professor John E. Carlstrom
Professor John E. Carlstrom is the Subramanyan Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He is a member of the Departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics; Enrico Fermi Institute; Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP); and he has a joint scientist position with the Division of High Energy Physics at Argonne National Laboratory. He is currently the Deputy Director of the KICP. His research focuses on cosmology through new measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation. He led the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer South Pole experiment and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Array. Currently, Carlstrom is the PI of the 10-meter South Pole Telescope located at the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen Scott South Pole Research Station, and the Director of the Combined Array for Millimeter Astronomy (CARMA). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He has received several awards including a MacArthur Fellowship. He has participated in several advisory committees, including the 2010 Decadal Review of Astronomy & Astrophysics. He has mentored 19 PhD students and 25 postdoctoral fellows, and has co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed papers. Carlstrom received his PhD in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988 and was a postdoc at Caltech before joining the faculty in 1991. He joined the faculty at U. Chicago in 1995.
Kyle Cranmer is Associate Professor of Physics at New York University, member of the NYU Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, and Affiliated Faculty at the Center for Data Science. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005, and then was a Goldhaber Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 2005-2007 before joining the Physics Department Faculty at New York University in 2007. He received the 2006 Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering from the DOE Office of Science and the Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation in 2010. His research has focused on the search for the Higgs boson and subsequent measurement of its properties, searches for new physics at colliders and fixed target experiments, measurement of the top quark pair production cross section, development of algorithms for triggering, and development of statistical methodology for High Energy Physics (HEP). Cranmer is active in the discussions around data preservation and data access for HEP and serves on the Advisory Board for INSPIRE and HepData. He is well known for public lectures, media appearances, and outreach activities, and he served as co-convener for the working group focusing on education and outreach to the general public as part of the 2013 Snowmass Community Summer Study. Cranmer has published hundreds of papers with the ALEPH, ATLAS, APEX, and CDF collaborations as well as papers with few authors focused on phenomenology and statistics.
Aaron Dominguezis the Dean of Arts and Sciences at the Catholic University of America located in Washington, DC, where he is also a professor of physics in the Physics Department. His main area of research is in using particle colliders to search for new physics, including the recently discovered Higgs boson. His area of expertise in instrumentation is in designing, building and using silicon charged particle trackers as precision tools to reconstruct the complicated interactions taking place in these collisions. He received his undergraduate degrees from Whitman College and Caltech, his PhD in physics from UC San Diego and was a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2005, he was the recipient of the NSF CAREER award. He has played numerous leadership positions in the L3, CDF and CMS experiments. In particular, he is currently deputy project leader for the upgrades of CMS and is the PI of the cooperative agreement with the NSF that is funding the US efforts of nine universities to improve the silicon pixel detector, hadron calorimeter and trigger in preparation for high luminosity runs of the LHC in coming years. He has mentored seven postdoctoral researchers, three graduate students to completion with three currently in progress, and numerous undergraduates. He sits on several advisory boards, including QuarkNet’s, and is the author of more than 900 papers in experimental high energy physics and instrumentation.
Salman Habib is a Senior Physicist and Computational Scientist with a joint appointment in Argonne National Laboratory's (ANL) High Energy Physics (HEP) and Mathematics and Computer Science Divisions. He is a Senior Member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago and a Senior Fellow in the Computation Institute, jointly operated by ANL and University of Chicago. He is the Co-Director of the HEP Forum for Computational Excellence and a member of the Fermilab Physics Advisory Committee; he has served on a number of DOE and NSF review committees and panels. Prior to joining ANL in 2011, Habib spent 20 years in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, most of it in the Elementary Particles and Field Theory group. His research interests have spanned a broad range of topics --quantum field theory in curved space, early universe physics, non-equilibrium field theory, classical and quantum dynamical systems, the quantum-classical transition, quantum control, beam dynamics in accelerators, stochastic ODEs and PDEs, applications of advanced statistical methods, and physical cosmology and astrophysics. He has been active in the application of large-scale parallel computing as a powerful scientific resource in many of these fields. Habib's recent research has focused primarily on precision cosmology, in particular on making accurate predictions for large-scale cosmological surveys in order to investigate properties of dark energy and dark matter, measure neutrino masses, and study primordial density fluctuations. He is a member of the survey science collaborations for the Dark Energy Survey (DES), Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Habib's undergraduate degree is from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and his Ph.D. is from the University of Maryland. He is a member of the American Physical Society, American Mathematical Society, Association of Computing Machinery, and the Computer Society of IEEE. Habib has published more than 175 technical papers and mentored more than 20 students and 30 postdoctoral fellows.
Professor Karsten Heeger
Professor Karsten Heeger is a Professor of Physics and Director of the Wright Laboratory at Yale University. His research focuses on the study of neutrino oscillations and neutrino mass. His current work is on precision measurements of reactor antineutrinos and the search for neutrinoless double beta decay. Prof. Heeger received his undergraduate degree in physics from Oxford University and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle where he worked on a model-independent measurement of the solar 8B neutrino flux in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO). For his thesis work he was awarded the 2003 APS Dissertation Award. Before joining the faculty at Yale University he was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin and a Chamberlain Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His work has been recognized with several awards including Outstanding Junior Investigator awards from DOE High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2009), and a Kavli Fellowship (2012). He has served on national and international review committees and recently chaired the APS Committee on International Scientific Affairs (2012).
JoAnne Hewett is a Professor in the SLAC Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at Stanford University and is the Director of the Elementary Particle Physics Division at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Her research focuses on models of physics Beyond the Standard Model with an emphasis on collider signatures and the interface with astroparticle physics. She has done seminal work in the areas of phenomenology of extra spatial dimensions, extended Higgs sectors, supersymmetry, new physics signatures in heavy flavor physics, dark matter, and the complementarity of experimental probes of dark matter. She received her B.S. and Ph.D. from Iowa State University in 1982 and 1988, respectively, and moved to SLAC in 1994 after being a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin and Assistant Physicist at Argonne National Laboratory. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a member of the Chairline of the APS Division of Particles and Fields, the U.S. representative on the European Committee on Future Accelerators, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at University of California, Santa Barbara. She has served on the Program Advisory Committee for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) and SLAC, the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (2004-2006), the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) (2006 and 2014) and has been program director of the SLAC Summer Institute since 2003.
Kay Kinoshita is Professor and Head of the Department of Physics at the University of Cincinnati. Her research in flavor physics has focused largely on B hadrons and bottomonia at the CLEO, CLEO II, and Belle experiments, and is known for innovative B reconstruction techniques. She has also pursued searches for heavily ionizing elementary particles and modeling of radiation effects from particle beams. After receiving AB and AM degrees from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, she was a postdoc and then junior faculty at Harvard. In 1993 she moved to Virginia Tech as a Professor and then to the University of Cincinnati in 1998, where she has been Department Head since 2009. She has been a Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellow of Radcliffe College and is an American Physical Society (APS) Fellow. She has also served on the University Research Associates (URA) Visiting Committee for Fermilab and the Executive Committee of the Division of Particles and Fields of the APS.
David Larbalestier is the Francis Eppes Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Chief Materials Scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University, and Director of the Applied Superconductivity Center (ASC). He gained his BS and Ph.D. at the Imperial College, London. Previously he was in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and in the Department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he held both the L. V. Shubnikov Chair and the Grainger Chair of Superconductivity. He has been active in superconductivity since his Ph.D. for which his thesis work garnered the Matthey Prize of Imperial College. After two years in Switzerland, he returned to England in 1972 to the Superconducting Magnet Research Group of the Rutherford Laboratory, working for four years on the development of multifilamentary Nb3Sn conductors and magnets. This work culminated in the first filamentary Nb3Sn magnets, one outcome of which was first filamentary Nb3Sn NMR magnet for which he shared a 1978 IR-100 award with an Oxford Instrument Company team. He joined the University of Wisconsin in 1976. His group has had a large influence on the understanding and application of both low and high temperature superconductors. His group made the definitive studies of the materials science and processing of the most widely used superconductor, Niobium Titanium, an influence recognized by the 1991 IEEE Particle Accelerator Conference Award and by election to Fellowship of the American Physical Society. Professor Larbalestier has been exceptionally active in promoting collaborations uniting industry, national laboratory and other university groups, exerting a leadership role in both the Low Temperature and High Temperature Materials Superconductor Communities, achievements recognized by prizes of the IEEE (1991 and 2000) and the Council for Chemical Research (2000) for his work and that of his collaborators on (Bi,Pb)2Sr2Ca2Cu3O10-x. He has served on many review panels of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE), was a member of the 1987 National Academy of Sciences Panel on High Temperature Superconductivity, and led the 1996 World Technology Evaluation Center Panel on Energy Applications of Superconductors sponsored by DOE and NSF. He was a member of the 2003 National Research Council panel Committee on Opportunities in High Magnetic Field science (COHMAG) assessing the status and future of high magnetic field science and technology. His former students, post-doctoral workers, and visiting scientists are widely dispersed in the superconductivity community in the US, Europe, and Asia. During 2000 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Geneva and Visiting Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Fellow at the Imperial College of the University of London. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003. In 2007 he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Cryogenic Materials Conference and in 2009-2010 was the Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Council on Superconductivity. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK), the National Academy of Inventors, the IEEE, the Materials Research Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Born a UK citizen, Professor Larbalestier became a U.S. citizen in 1988. His work has been supported by several programs of the DOE (High Energy Physics, Fusion Energy Sciences, and Energy Efficiency), Fermilab, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, NSF, ITER and various other U.S. national laboratories.
Professor Hitoshi Murayama
Professor Hitoshi Murayama is MacAdams Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as Faculty Senior Staff at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Since 2007, he also runs the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo on a part-time basis. His main research area is theoretical particle physics, in particular models of physics beyond the standard model. The subjects include supersymmetry, dark matter, neutrinos, collider physics, inflation and dark energy. His research also extends to neutrino experiment (KamLAND), theoretical condensed matter, nuclear, and atomic physics, and observational cosmology as PI of SuMIRe (imaging and spectroscopic surveys on Subaru). He assists Lyn Evans as Deputy Director of the Linear Collider Collaboration. He was awarded Yukawa Commemoration Prize (2002), APS Fellow (2003), and became a member of American Academy for Arts and Sciences (2013). He received distinction from the Japanese Cabinet Office as a “Passion without borders Japanese” (2012). He is well-known for clear and inspirational talks, and served on numerous advisory committees including SPC for CERN and SLAC, Fermilab PAC, and HEPAP subpanels. He has several bestseller books on particle physics and cosmology with more than 500,000 copies printed altogether.
Dr. Fulvia Pilat is since 2017 the Research Accelerator Division Director at the ORNL Spallation Neutron Source. Fulvia is an accelerator physicist, graduated in physics at the University of Trieste in Italy in 1986 with a thesis on accelerator nonlinear dynamics sponsored by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). After a fellowship at CERN, she worked at the Superconducting Super Collider project in Texas before joining Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1994. Fulvia led commissioning activities and the program for beam experiments at RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. In 2005 she became the Head of Operations for RHIC and its injectors and eventually joined Jefferson Laboratory in 2010 as Deputy Associate Director for Accelerators and also served as the Program Lead for the Jefferson Lab Energy Ion Collider (JLEIC), the JLab proposal for the planned next generation facility for Nuclear Physics. Fulvia is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, has served as the Chair of the APS Division of Particle Beams, the main organization promoting the interest of accelerator physics in the physics community, and is serving as Chair of the IEEE PAST Committee, which promotes accelerators in the engineering community. She has served as a Chair and reviewer in many Department of Energy (DOE), National Science Foundation (NSF), and Laboratory Management Review Committees.
Tom Roser is a Senior Scientist, Deputy Associate Laboratory Director for Accelerators, and Chair of the Collider-Accelerator Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). He received his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland, in 1984. Before joining BNL in 1991, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, working on spin effects in high-energy elastic proton-proton scattering and acceleration of polarized proton beams. At BNL he oversaw the high intensity beam development at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) and led the effort to accelerate polarized protons in the AGS using compact partial Siberian snakes. Starting in 1999 he led the commissioning of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the development of polarized proton acceleration, resulting in the first 500 GeV center-of-mass energy polarized proton collisions in RHIC. Thomas Roser is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Physical Society (APS), and IEEE and was elected to the APS Council, representing the Division of Particle Beams. He also serves on the Board of Governors of the U.S. Particle Accelerator School.
Professor Gabriella Sciolla
Professor Gabriella Sciolla is an Associate Professor in the Physics Department at Brandeis University. Over the years, Sciolla has explored all three frontiers of particle physics. She studied the Z boson decays at LEP at CERN, measured CP violation in the B system and studied rare B decays at the BaBar B factory at SLAC, and performed direct detection searches for Dark Matter. Most recently, she joined the ATLAS Collaboration at the LHC at CERN where she measures the properties of the newly discovered Higgs boson and searches for physics beyond the standard model. She also serves as the US-ATLAS Deputy Physics Advisor since 2013. Sciolla has served as a member of the Fermilab Physics Advisory Committee (2010-2014), Chair of the BaBar Speakers Bureau (2005-2006), and member and Chair of the Executive Committee of the SLAC Users Organization (2003-2004). Sciolla received her Ph.D. in Physics from University of Turin (Italy) in 1996. She was a postdoc at SLAC, a Pappalardo Fellow and then junior faculty at MIT before joining Brandeis University in 2010.
Maria Spiropulu is a Professor of Physics at the Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy of the California Institute of Technology. She has been researching elementary particles and their interactions for the past 20 years at Fermilab’s Tevatron (1993-2003) and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC, 2004-now). She is known for developing the “double blind” analysis method in searches for supersymmetry at the Tevatron. Spiropulu carried out the first monojet analysis at hadron colliders with interpretation in the context of extra dimensions, and co-authored an often-cited review of particle physics probes of extra dimensions in 2002 for the Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science. Spiropulu co-invented and co-developed an innovative kinematic variable basis that can be used for discovery and characterization of new heavy particle signals. Spiropulu has served on many influential committees; among them the American Physical Society’s (APS) Organizing Committee for the 2001 Snowmass Summer Study on "The Future of Particle Physics"; the CDF Speakers Committee; the Fermilab Colloquium Committee; and the CMS Speakers Committee Scientific Secretary and Deputy Chair. She has also worked on the Calorimetry Task Forces (2008 & 2010) as well as the Computing, Software and Analysis Data Challenges in 2006 and 2007. From 2001 to 2003, she was an Enrico Fermi Fellow at the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago. Her research interests include searches for dark matter in colliders, the full characterization of the recently discovered Higgs boson at the LHC and its utility as a tag of new physics , look-alike model separation, multi-model inference methods in particle physics, novel “big & smart” data analysis approaches, complex intelligence computational methods including quantum machine learning, new accelerator technologies, and novel detector R&D. In 2014 Spiropulu was elected vice-chair of the Forum on International Physics of the APS. She currently serves on the APS’s Committee on International Scientific Affairs (CISA), Fermilab Physics Advisory Committee (PAC), and is a member of the Aspen Center for Physics. She has been an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow since 2010 and an APS Fellow since 2014.
Christopher W. Stubbs is the Samuel Moncher Professor of Physics and of Astronomy at Harvard University, and was chair of Harvard’s Physics Department from 2007 to 2010. His research interests lie at the intersection of cosmology, particle physics, and gravitation. Stubbs received an International Baccalaureate diploma from the Tehran International School in 1975, a BSc in physics from the University of Virginia in 1981, and a PhD in physics from the University of Washington in 1988. His research career started with tabletop tests of gravitation, performing precision measurements to explore possible modifications to gravity. After working on searches for dark matter, he was a member of one of the teams that discovered the accelerating expansion of the Universe. His subsequent work has been primarily focused on exploring the nature of Dark Energy. Stubbs is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiative in Research, the NASA Achievement Medal, and is a co-recipient (with other members of the High-z Supernovae Team) of the Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
Professor Michael Syphers is Research Professor at Northern Illinois University, Deputy Director of the Northern Illinois Center for Accelerator and Detector Development (NICADD), and holds a scientific Joint Appointment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). Prof. Syphers has an extensive career in accelerator and particle beam physics and in accelerator physics education. Before arriving at NIU in 2015, Dr. Syphers was Professor of Physics at Michigan State University from 2010-2015, with appointments at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory and the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams on the MSU campus. He has held scientific appointments at several national laboratories, including Fermilab (1985-1989; 1998-2010), the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory (1989-1994), and Brookhaven National Laboratory (1994-1998) leading to major responsibilities in various accelerator programs and projects, such as the Tevatron, the SSC, the AGS, RHIC (polarized proton collider), and USLHC/LARP. He also has been recognized for his extensive teaching in accelerator and beam physics over the past three decades at major universities and at the U.S. Particle Accelerator School. Prof. Syphers received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois - Chicago (1987), is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2004).
Eva Halkiadakis is an Associate Professor of Physics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She is an experimental particle physicist and is member of the CMS experiment at CERN. She has also been a member of the KTeV and CDF experiments at Fermilab. Her recent research focuses on searching for new physics at the LHC, with a special emphasis on searches for new physics in multi-jet signatures. While at the Tevatron she made significant contributions to precision electroweak and top quark physics measurements. Professor Halkiadakis has held several leadership positions within these collaborations, which include serving as the CMS Supersymmetry Physics Group co-convener from 2012-13, and as the CDF Electroweak Physics Group co-convener from 2006-2008. She has been a member of several conference organizing committees, which most recently include the APS Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) to be held at Rutgers in 2015, and the Aspen Winter Conference on Particle Physics in 2012. She has also served as session chair at many high profile particle physics conferences. Professor Halkiadakis has been a member of review panels for the Department of Energy and for the National Science Foundation. She is a frequent referee for the journals Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D. Professor Halkiadakis is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2008, the Fermilab LHC Physics Center Fellowship in 2011 and 2012, and the Rutgers Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence in 2012. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2001 and was subsequently a postdoctoral researcher with the University of Rochester before joining the Rutgers faculty in 2006.
Joseph Incandela is the Yzurdiaga Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research has been focused on the search for new fundamental particles and the study of their properties with experiments at 3 generations of hadron colliders. At present, his research is carried out with the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, and focuses on searches for new particles that could help understand dark matter as well as the Higgs boson discovered in 2012. He has been a proponent and leader of a number of large instrumentation projects based on silicon detectors. He has been active in the leadership of particle physics research collaborations, serving as Deputy Spokesperson (2010-11) and Spokesperson (2012-13) of the CMS Collaboration. Professor Incandela has published more than 870 peer-reviewed journal articles. He received his PhD in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1986. He was a CERN Fellow, Wilson Fellow at FNAL and Staff Scientist at FNAL before joining UC Santa Barbara in 2001. He is Fellow of the APS and AAAS. He was a co-recipient of the 2012 Special Fundamental Physics Prize.
Joshua R. Klein is a Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1994. Klein’s research is aimed primarily at studying neutrinos and searching for dark matter. He was the physics analysis coordinator for the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), which provided the solution to the long-standing Solar Neutrino Problem. SNO was able to do this by observing both the neutrinos made by the Sun, as well as other flavors of neutrino into which the Sun’s neutrinos transformed. Klein received a Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator award and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship for work geared at significantly improving SNO’s measurements. He has major involvements in the MiniCLEAN dark matter experiment, and the Experiment at the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility (ELBNF). He is also currently the US Spokesperson for the SNO+ experiment, whose physics goals include a search for a rare nuclear decay, which if observed, would demonstrate that the neutrino is its own antiparticle. Klein became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012.
Stefano Profumo is an Associate Professor with tenure at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Deputy Director for Theory of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics. His research focuses on theoretical particle physics, cosmology and high-energy astrophysics. Specifically, Profumo's key contributions are in the areas of particle dark matter and models for the generation of the baryon asymmetry. His research work straddles the study of high-energy astrophysical phenomena, collider phenomenology, indirect searches for particle dark matter, and the study of models for new physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles. He is the author or co-author of over 100 refereed articles with more than 6,000 citations. Profumo is passionate about mentoring and teaching and was the recipient of the 2012 "Excellence in Teaching" award, UC Santa Cruz's highest award for teaching. He is the founding editor of "Physics of the Dark Universe" and of two other research journals, and has served on numerous national and international review and advisory panels. Profumo received his PhD from the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and his MS from Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy. He held postdoctoral positions at Florida State University and at the California Institute of Technology before joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz in 2007. He received the DoE Outstanding Junior Investigator Award in 2009.
Laura Reina received her Ph.D. degree in high-energy theoretical physics from The International School for Advanced Studies (Trieste, Italy) in 1992. After postdoctoral work at the University of Brussels (Belgium) and at Brookhaven National Laboratory, she joined the University of Wisconsin in Madison as assistant scientist in 1997 and the FSU faculty in 1998, where she was appointed full professor in 2007. In 2005 she was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. Dr. Reina's research is mainly oriented to the phenomenology of elementary particle physics, with particular attention to the effects of perturbative QCD corrections in collider physics. Recently she has conducted some important studies of the production of Higgs bosons and weak vector bosons in association with heavy quarks at hadron colliders and she has been focusing on the application and development of analytical and numerical algorithms for the systematic implementation of higher order pertubative field theory calculations. Her expertise also includes the physics of heavy flavors, CP-violation, and new models beyond the Standard Model.
Stefan Söldner-Rembold is Professor and Head of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester (UK). He works on several future liquid argon neutrino physics experiments at Fermilab to study neutrino properties (LBNF, LAr1-ND). He is one of the proponents of the PINGU extension of the IceCube detector at the South Pole, which has the goal to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy. His group is also building the tracking detector for the double-beta decay experiment SuperNEMO in the Modane Underground Laboratory in France, and he chairs the Collaboration’s Institutional Board. In 2013, he received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award for studying `the origin of mass’ and he has been a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (FInstP) since 2010. He served as Spokesperson of the Dzero Experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron from 2009 until 2011, after having been Dzero Physics Coordinator for two years. His main research interest on Dzero was the search for Higgs bosons. He was a member of STFC’s Particle Physics Grants Panel (PPGP) from 2005 until 2009 and has been a member of several review panels of the US Department of Energy since 2009. In 1999, he was awarded a Heisenberg Fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG) working as Visiting Scientist at Fermilab (2001-2003) and as CERN Scientific Associate and OPAL
Physics Coordinator at CERN (2000-2001). From 1992 until 1999, he was a postdoc and lecturer at Freiburg University, where he received his Habilitation in 1996, first with the ZEUS Experiment at DESY in Hamburg and then with the OPAL Experiment at CERN. He received his doctorate from TU Munich with a Fellowship at the Max-Planck Institute for Physics studying data taken by the Experiment E665 at Fermilab.
Mark Trodden is the Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-Director of the Center for Particle Cosmology, and currently serves as the Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Trodden is a theoretical physicist who has worked broadly in both cosmology and particle physics. The majority of his work spans particle physics and cosmology, and includes the development of the modified gravity approach to cosmic acceleration, approaches to dark energy and dark matter; extra dimensional models of particle physics and cosmology; and the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe. Trodden holds an MA and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics from Cambridge University, UK, and an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Physics from Brown University. He previously held the Alumni Professorship at Syracuse University, and has had visiting positions at Cornell University, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, and was a Sir Thomas Lyle Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Trodden is a Kavli Frontiers Fellow, was awarded the Science and Technology Outreach Award of the Technology Alliance of Central New York, is a Cottrell Scholar, and has chaired the National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium and the Working Group on Cosmological Connections of the American Linear Collider Physics Group. He currently serves as the theory advisor in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Dark Energy Science Collaboration, and is a member of the DOE-HEP group “Cosmic Visions – Dark Energy”. Trodden is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and sits on the editorial boards of Physics Letters B, the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, and the Springer Multiversal Journeys Series. He is the co-author of over 130 papers, and lectures widely on his work, both in the US and internationally, including a number of prestigious public lectures and panel discussions.
James Wells is Professor of Physics and member of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research focuses on beyond the Standard Model phenomenology with emphasis on electroweak symmetry breaking, mass generation, and unification. He has served on numerous study panels and reports for future colliders and facilities, including the Tevatron, Large Hadron Collider (LHC), International Linear Collider (ILC), Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), and future high-energy hadron colliders. He has also been an invited author for the Review of Particle Physics published by the Particle Data Group (PDG). Professor Wells was recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship (1999), Outstanding Junior Investigator award from the Department of Energy (2000), and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2013). He currently serves as a member of the Panel on Public Affairs for the American Physical Society. Professor Wells received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1995 and held postdoctoral research positions at Stanford University and European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) before becoming faculty at University of California, Davis. He became staff member in the Theory Division at CERN in 2007 and rejoined the University of Michigan faculty full-time in 2013.
Mayda M. Velasco is a Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and the Director of the "Instituto de Cosmologia y Fsica de las Americas (COFI)" in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She received her PhD from Northwestern University in 1995 based on experimental work done on the proton spin crisis, as a member of the Spin Muon Collaboration at CERN. In 1996, she became a CERN Fellow and later became a CERN Scientific staff. In that period she was a member of the NA48 Collaboration, where she worked toward the understanding of the electroweak sector, and, in particular, its important role in solving the problem of CP violation in the Universe. She also formed and led the NA59 experiment at CERN devoted to the understanding of the use of aligned crystals to produce linearly/circularly polarized photon beams starting from unpolarized electrons. She received a CERN Achievement Award before becoming a faculty member in the USA in 1999, where she won a Sloan Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Award (Mellon Foundation) a few years later. As a starting faculty, her research program focused on precision and high sensitivity measurements in particle physics ranging from ultra-rare neutral and charged kaon decays to possible precision measurements of the CP nature of the Higgs boson at a future gamma-gamma Collider. Her current research involves experimental studies of fundamental particles and their interactions using colliding particle beams. As a member of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, she leads the effort of searches for very rare decays of the Top quark and the newly discovered Higgs boson. At CMS, she has served in various tasks, like the coordinator for the Detector Performance Group of the hadron calorimeters. She has served in several boards, including the one for the CLIC-CTF3 facility, and has served on several other review committees and panels.
Risa Wechsler is an Associate Professor in the Physics Department at Stanford University and in the Particle Physics and Astrophysics Department at SLAC National Accelerator Lab. She is currently the Nina C. Crocker Faculty Scholar in the Humanities and Sciences at Stanford, and is a member and Assistant Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle and Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford and SLAC. Her research focuses primarily on cosmological structure formation and its use in probing the physics governing the evolution of the Universe. She has made significant contributions to our understanding of the formation of dark matter halos and the connection between galaxies and dark matter, and to the use of galaxy surveys to constrain cosmological parameters. She is currently the Co-Spokesperson of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Collaboration, and is a founding member of the Dark Energy Survey and the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration. She is the author or co-author of more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in cosmology and astrophysics, and has also been active in public outreach, including frequent public lectures and appearances on the Discovery Channel, Science Channel, and PBS. She received her S.B from MIT and her PhD from University of California at Santa Cruz in 2001. She did postdoctoral work at the University of Michigan and at the University of Chicago, where she was a Hubble Fellow and Enrico Fermi Fellow, and joined the faculty at Stanford and SLAC in 2006.
Geralyn (Sam) Zeller is a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). She received a Ph.D. in particle physics from Northwestern University in 2002. Her dissertation, a measurement of the weak mixing angle in neutrino deep inelastic scattering, earned a Mitsuyoshi Tanaka Dissertation award in 2003 and has been cited over 600 times. She worked at both Columbia University and Los Alamos National Laboratory prior to joining the staff at Fermilab in 2009. She has participated in seven different experiments studying the properties of neutrinos over the course of her career, including NuTeV, MiniBooNE, SciBooNE, MicroBooNE, ArgoNeuT, Short Baseline Near Detector (SBND), and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). In 2012, she received a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Early Career award to further the study of neutrino interactions using liquid argon time projection chambers and is currently co-spokesperson for the MicroBooNE experiment.
Dr. Zeller served as one of the Neutrino Working Group conveners for the 2013 American Physical Society Division of Particle and Field's Community Summer Study and for the 2011 Fundamental Physics at the Intensity Frontier workshop. Her current research focuses on neutrino-nucleus interactions and precision neutrino oscillation measurements.