Faculty

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 S. Wurtele earned his undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics, as well as a Ph.D. in Physics, from UC Berkeley. After spending a decade at MIT, he returned to UC Berkeley in 1995, where he is currently a Professor of Physics. His research spans plasma and accelerator theory, and antihydrogen physics. Prof. Wurtele is a member of the ALPHA collaboration at CERN, which synthesizes, traps, and conducts precision measurements on antihydrogen to investigate fundamental symmetries between matter and antimatter. He has been a Foreign Research Fellow at Japan’s Institute of Space...

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 gravitational-wave detectors. In January 2025, Victoria will join UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in Physics.

Select Publications

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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...

Peter Yu

Professor Emeritus

Peter Yu received his B.Sc from the Univ. of Hong Kong in 1967 and the Ph.D. in Physics from Brown in 1972. After doing postdoctoral work at Berkeley between 1971-73, he joined the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center as a research staff member. He returned to Berkeley as a faculty member in 1979. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Miller Professor.

Research Interests

My research interest has been in experimental studies of the physics of semiconductors. I am particularly interested in problems relevant to device application of...

Mike Zaletel

Associate Professor

Michael Zaletel joined the Department of Physics faculty in July 2018 and is the Thomas and Alison Schneider Chair. An Oakland native, he received his AA from Deep Springs College, his AB with highest honors in physics from Harvard University in 2009, and his Ph.D. at Berkeley working with Professor Joel Moore. In 2017, after a postdoctoral position in the quantum computing division of Microsoft Research at Station Q in Santa Barbara, he joined the faculty at Princeton Physics in 2017. He says he is...

Alex Zettl

Professor Emeritus of the Graduate School

Alex Zettl received his B.A. from UC Berkeley in 1978 and his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1983. He joined the Physics Department faculty at UC Berkeley in 1983. Currently he is Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley, Senior Scientist at LBNL, and Member of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at Berkeley. Awards and Honors include Presidential Young Investigator Award (1984-89), Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1984-86), IBM Faculty Development Award (1985-87), and Miller Professorship (1995), Lucent Technologies Faculty Award (1996), Fellow of the American Physical Society (1999), Lawrence Berkeley...