Physics Department Faculty

Hitoshi Murayama is a well-known theoretical particle physicist who works broadly, even on astrophysics, cosmology, and condensed matter physics. He has been a professor in the University of California, Berkeley, since 2000, and is also the founding director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) at the University of Tokyo, serving from 2007 to 2018. Born in Japan, lived in Germany for four years and in the US for 21 years, served on advisory committees around the world, he is a multicultural global denizen. In October 2014, he was invited to...

Jeffrey B. Neaton received his Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University in 2000. After a postdoc at Rutgers University, and after having worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a postdoc and staff scientist at the Molecular Foundry, he joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 2014. He is currently Director of the Molecular Foundry, a Department of Energy Nanoscale Science Research Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he is also a Senior Faculty Scientist. Neaton has received a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Outstanding Achievement Award in 2007, and the...

Joseph Orenstein received both B.S. and Ph.D degrees in Physics from MIT. He then joined Bell Labs as a Member of the Technical Staff in 1981 and later as Distinguished MTS. After ten years at Bell Labs he joined the faculty at UC Berkeley and the staff at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where he is currently Distinguished Professor of Physics and Senior Staff Scientist, respectively. The achievements of his lab were recognized by the Isakson Award for Optics from the American Physical Society. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences...

Saul Perlmutter is a 2011 Nobel Laureate, sharing the prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe. He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, and director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and executive director of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics. His undergraduate degree was from Harvard and his PhD from UC...