Faculty

Mark Strovink

Professor Emeritus

Mark Strovink, Ph.D. 1970 (Princeton). Joined UC Berkeley faculty in 1973 (Professor since 1980). Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society; served as program advisor for Fermilab (chair), SLAC (chair), Brookhaven, and the U.S. Department of Energy; served as D0 Physics Coordinator (1997 and 1998).

Research Interests

After 40 years in elementary particle physics, in late 2004 I turned my attention to the unexplained force that accelerates the universe's expansion. As an experimentalist, I am interested in understanding how best to standardize Type Ia supernovae (SNe) as...

Aziza Suleymanzade

Assistant Professor

Aziza is an experimental physicist working on hybrid quantum systems with Rydberg atoms, superconducting circuits, and diamond nanophotonics. Her interests include novel quantum interfaces and the generation of entangled resources across different platforms for quantum processing, communication, and sensing.

Currently, she is a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard, working on quantum networks based on silicon vacancy defects in diamond nanophotonic cavities. During her PhD at the University of Chicago, she worked on quantum transduction using Rydberg atoms in optical and superconducting...

Mahiko Suzuki

Professor Emeritus

B.S., 1961; M.S., 1963; Ph.D., 1965, University of Tokyo; Research Fellow, Caltech 1965-66; R.C. Tolman Fellow, Caltech 1966-67. Member, Institute for Advanced Study, 1967-68; Research Associate, University of Tokyo, 1968-69; Visiting Associate Professor, Columbia University 1969-70; Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley, 1970-74; Professor, University of California 1974-present; Fulbright Scholar 1965-68; J.S. Guggenheim Fellow 1976-77; Japan Society for Promotion of Science Fellow 1995; Fellow, American Physical Society.

Research Interests

The Standard Model of...

Feng Wang

Professor

Feng Wang received a B.A. from Fudan University, Shanghai, in 1999 and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2004. From 2005-2007, he has been a Miller Fellow with Miller Institute for Basic Science at Berkeley. He joined the physics faculty in fall, 2007.

Research Interests

We are interested in light-matter interaction in condensed matter physics, with an emphasis on novel physical phenomena emerging in nanoscale structures and at surfaces/interfaces. When electrons and phonons are confined in nanometer scale or at surface/interfaces, they respond differently to external stimuli. We...

Haichen Wang

Assistant Professor

Haichen Wang received a B.S. in physics from Peking University in 2007, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. His Ph.D. thesis was about the discovery of the Higgs boson using data collected by the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. He was an Owen Chamberlain fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 2013 to 2018 before joining the Physics Department in January 2019. In 2021, he received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to develop novel machine learning applications for particle physics and construct...

Martin White

Professor

Martin White received his B.S. in 1988 from the University of Adelaide and his Ph.D. in 1992 from Yale. After postdoctoral positions at the CfPA in Berkeley and an Enrico Fermi Fellowship in Chicago he became Assistant Professor of Physics and of Astronomy at UIUC. In 1998 he became an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Harvard before moving to Berkeley as a Professor of Physics in 2001.

Research Interests

I am a theorist and phenomenologist. While I originally trained in Particle Physics, in the last few years my interest has centered around the question of the formation of...

Michael S. Witherell

Professor and Director Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Michael Witherell is Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Professor of Physics. Previously he was Vice Chancellor for Research and held the Presidential Chair in Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and before that he was Director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab).

Witherell received his B.S. from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from the University of Wisconsin. He then served on the faculty at Princeton and at UC Santa Barbara. He won the W. K. H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle...

Jonathan Wurtele

Professor

Jonathan Wurtele received his B.A. (Physics and Mathematics) in 1979 and his Ph.D. (Physics) in 1985 from UC Berkeley. He was a Research Scientist at MIT’s Plasma Fusion Center (1984-87) and Assistant and Associate Professor in MIT’s Physics Department (1987-95). He returned to Berkeley in 1995, where he is now Professor of Physics, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has been a Foreign Research Fellow at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (Japan). He shared the John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research (2011). He is a Member of the ALPHA (...

Victoria Xu

Assistant Professor

Victoria Xu received her B.S. in Physics from UC Santa Barbara, and her Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley. For her thesis, she worked with Professor Holger Müller on trapped cavity atom interferometers for precision measurements and fundamental physics. She then joined the MIT LIGO Laboratory as a Postdoctoral Associate, where she worked on commissioning the frequency-dependent squeezing upgrade for broadband quantum enhancement of the LIGO observatories. In January 2025, Victoria will join UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in Physics.

Select Publications

"Squeezing the quantum...

Ahmet Yildiz

Professor

Ahmet Yildiz received his Ph.D. in Biophysics with Paul Selvin at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2004. After completing his postdoctoral work with Ron Vale at the University of California San Francisco, he joined the Physics Department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008.

Research Interests

Eukaryotic cells are intricately organized on many length and time scales, from molecules to organelles. Much of this organization is achieved by motor proteins, which directionally transport intracellular components along cytoskeletal tracks (myosin on actin...