Faculty

Mina Aganagic

Professor of Mathematics and Physics, Chern-Simons Distinguished Chair in Mathematical Physics

Mina Aganagic received her BS (1995) and PhD (1999) degrees from California Institute of Technology. From 1999-2003 she had a postdoctoral appointment at Harvard University. She was an Assistant Professor of Physics and an Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington, Seattle from 2003-4. In 2004 she was appointed Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the University of California Berkeley. She was promoted to an Associate Professor in 2008, and to Professor in 2012.

Awards and Honors

Simons Investigator, Simons Foundation, 2016-2026
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Ehud Altman

Professor

Professor Ehud Altman received his Ph.D. from the Technion, Haifa in 2002. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard university for three years before joining the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science as a Yigal Alon fellow in 2005. He was promoted to the rank of Associate professor there in 2011. In 2010 he was awarded the young investigator prize from the Israel Physical Society and the Krill prize of the Wolf foundation. During the academic year 2012-2013 he was a Miller visiting professor at UC Berkeley. He joined the Physics department of UC Berkeley as a professor in the...

James Analytis

Professor

James Analytis joined the faculty in January 2013 as the Charles Kittel Chair in condensed matter physics, and served as Department Chair from 2020-2023. He received his B.Sc. in physics from Canterbury University in 2001 and his D. Phil. from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes' Scholar in 2006. At Oxford, he worked with Stephen Blundell and Arzhang Ardavan on experimental and computational studies of quasi-two dimensional organic superconductors. Following his graduate studies, Analytis was a Lloyd's Tercentenary Fellow at the University of Bristol, where he worked on...

Jonathan Arons

Professor Emeritus

Jonathan Arons earned his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard in 1970. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton University Observatory in 1970-71, and at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1971-72. He joined the Astronomy Department at UC Berkeley in 1972, and the Physics Department in 1980. Fellowships and honors include: Woodrow Wilson and Danforth Graduate Fellowships, 1965-70; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1980; Miller Professorships, 1985-86 and 2002-03; elected as an APS Fellow in 1984. He currently serves as Executive Director of the Miller Institute and as Director of the Theoretical...

Stuart Bale

Professor

Stuart D. Bale received B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Minnesota in 1989 and 1994, respectively. After three years of postdoctoral work at Queen Mary College, University of London, he came to a research position at the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) at Berkeley. He joined the Physics faculty in 2004 and is the Director of SSL. He has held visiting appointments at the Observatoire de Paris, Meudon (Univ. Paris VII), LPCE/CNRS in Orleans, France, the University of Sydney, and Imperial College and Queen Mary University London. He is a recipient of the 2003 Presidential Early...

Korkut Bardakci

Professor Emeritus

Korkut Bardakci received his B.S. from Robert College, Turkey in 1957 and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1962. After postdoctoral appointments at the University of Minnesota and the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the UC Berkeley Physics Department as an assistant professor in 1966. He has been a Sloan Foundation fellow, a Guggenheim fellow and an Overseas visiting fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, England.

Research Interests

I am interested in string theories in general and in the problem of tachyon condensation in the bosonic string in particular....

Eric Betzig

Professor

Eric Betzig is a Professor of Molecular and Cell biology, the Eugene D. Commins Presidential Chair in Experimental Physics, a Senior Fellow at the Janelia Research Campus, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His Ph.D. thesis at Cornell University and subsequent work at AT&T Bell Labs involved the development of near-field optics – an early form of super-resolution microscopy. He left academia in 1995 to work in the machine tool industry, but returned ten years later when he and friend, Harald Hess, built the first super-...

Robert Birgeneau

Arnold and Barbara Silverman Distinguished Professor of Physics, Materials Science and Engineering, and Public Policy, Chancellor Emeritus

Professor Birgeneau received his Ph.D. in Physics from Yale University in 1966 with Professor Werner Wolf. He was on the faculty of Yale for one year and then spent one year at Oxford University. He was at Bell Laboratories from 1968 to 1975 and then went to MIT in September 1975 as Professor of Physics. In 1988 he became head of the department and in 1991 became Dean of Science at MIT. In 2000, he became President of the University of Toronto. In 2004 he became UC Berkeley’s Chancellor and joined the Physics faculty. He concluded his service as Chancellor at the end of May 2013 and is now...

Raphael Bousso

Professor and The Chancellor's Chair in Physics

Raphael Bousso received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1998 and went on to become a Postdoc at Stanford University. He also worked at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. In 2002/03 he was a fellow at the Harvard University physics department and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In July 2003 he joined the physics department at UC Berkeley.

Research Interests

My interests are in theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity.

The central principles of quantum mechanics and of general relativity (our classical theory of gravity) come into...

Raúl Briceño

Assistant Professor

Raúl Briceño was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. In 2013, he received his PhD in Physics from the University of Washington. He then joined the Center for Theoretical and Computational Physics at Jefferson Lab as a postdoc. After three years as a postdoc, in 2016 he became the Nathan Isgur Research Fellow at Jefferson Lab. Shortly after, in 2017 he started an Assistant Professor position at Old Dominion University with a joint appointment at Jefferson Lab as a Staff Scientist. His research largely focuses on aspects of theoretical nuclear and particle physics. In 2023, he joined the...