Faculty

Frances Hellman

Professor of the Graduate School

Frances Hellman received her BA in Physics from Dartmouth College in 1978, graduating summa cum laude and phi beta kappa with high honors in physics. She received her PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1985, studying what were then considered the high Tc superconductors (the A15's). After a 2 year postdoc in thin film magnetism at AT&T Bell Labs, she went to UCSD as an assistant professor in 1987, where she received tenure in 1994 and became a full professor in 2000. She joined the Physics Dept at UC Berkeley in Jan 2005, and became Chair of the Department in 2007. She...

William Holzapfel

Professor

I was born March 15, 1965 in Pittsburgh PA. After surviving an early program of experimentation with motorcycles and explosives, I went on to receive a B.A. in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1987. My graduate studies were completed in 1996 with a Ph.D. in physics from Berkeley. I was then a Fermi-McCormick fellow at the University of Chicago until I joined the faculty in 1998.

Research Interests

My primary research interests are in the measurement and interpretation of anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Primary anisotropies of the CMB provide a...

Petr Horava

Professor

Petr Horava received his Ph.D. in 1991 at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. He was awarded the Robert McCormick Research Fellowship at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, worked as a Research Associate at Princeton University, and won a Sherman Fairchild Senior Research Fellowship at Caltech, before joining the New High Energy Theory Center at Rutgers University in 2000 as an Associate Professor. In 1997, he was awarded the Junior Prize of the Czech Learned Society, and in 1999 he appeared on the list of top three scientists of the...

Luca Victor Iliesiu

Assistant Professor

Luca Iliesiu received his BA in Physics from Princeton University in 2015. He remained there for his PhD which he received in 2020. He was then appointed as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he was part of the Simons Ultra Quantum Matter Collaboration, before starting as an assistant professor at Berkeley in January 2024.

Barbara Jacak

Professor of Physics

After an international search, Barbara Jacak of the State University New York, Stony Brook, has been named as Berkeley Lab’s new director of the Nuclear Science Division. Jacak has also accepted a joint appointment as Faculty Senior Scientist at Berkeley Lab and Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley.

Jacak is one the leaders of the nuclear physics community in the United States. She did her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley, and her PhD at Michigan State University where her advisor was David K. Scott. On graduating from MSU, she received an Oppenheimer Fellowship at Los Alamos...

Bob Jacobsen

Professor Emeritus

Bob obtained a B.S.E.E. from MIT in 1978. He spent 1976 through 1986 working in the computer and data communications industry for a small company that was successively bought out by larger and larger companies. He left in 1986 to return to graduate school in physics, obtaining his Ph.D. in experimental high energy physics from Stanford in 1991. From 1991 through 1994, he was a Scientific Associate and Scientific Staff Member at CERN, the European Laboratory for Nuclear Physics, in Geneva Switzerland. While there, he was a member of the ALEPH collaboration concentrating on B physics and on...

Na Ji

Professor

Na Ji received her B.S. in Chemical Physics from the University of Science & Technology of China in 2000. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California Berkeley in 2005, working in the laboratory of Yuen-Ron Shen. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Materials Sciences Division of LBNL for 10 months, before moving to the Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute to continue her postdoctoral training in 2006. She became a Group Leader at Janelia Research Campus in 2011. She returned to join the Physics and Molecular & Cell Biology...

Steven Kahn

Dean of Mathematical & Physical Sciences, Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy
Steven M. Kahn is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy. He previously served on the faculty in these departments from 1984-98, but returned to Berkeley in 2022 to take up the position of Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Kahn received his A.B. (summa cum laude) from Columbia in 1975 and his Ph.D. in physics at Berkeley in 1980. In addition to Berkeley, he has served on the faculties of Columbia, where he was the I.I. Rabi Professor of Physics, and at Stanford, where he was the Cassius Lamb Kirk Professor in the Natural Sciences. Kahn is an experimental astrophysicist and cosmologist...

Dan Kasen

Professor

Prof. Kasen received his B.S. from Stanford University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley. Prior to returning to Cal, he was the Alan C. Davis fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a Hubble fellow at UC Santa Cruz. He joined the Berkeley physics faculty in 2010, jointly appointed with the nuclear science division at LBNL.

Edgar Knobloch

Professor

Edgar Knobloch, Ph.D., Harvard University (1978), Sc.D. University of Cambridge (1994). Faculty member since 1978.

Research Interests

My research interests center on nonlinear dynamics of dissipative systems. These focus on bifurcation theory, particularly in systems with symmetries, transition to chaos in such systems, low- and high-dimensional behavior of continuous systems, including spatial localization, and the theory of nonlinear waves. Applications include pattern formation in fluid systems, reaction-diffusion systems, and related systems of importance in geophysics and...