Faculty

Hartmut Haeffner

Professor

Hartmut Häffner received his PhD in physics from the University of Mainz / Germany in 2000. After short periods as a Postdoctoral fellow in Mainz and Bangalore/India, he received a Feodor-Lynen fellowship from the Alexander-von-Humboldt foundation Germany and went to NIST / Gaithersburg as a guest researcher (2000-2001). In 2001 he moved to the University of Innsbruck / Austria as a university assistant where he held a Marie-Curie fellowship from the European Union from 2002 - 2004. From 2004 till 2009 he worked as senior scientist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum...

Lawrence Hall

Professor

Lawrence Hall received his B.A. from Oxford in 1977 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1981. He was a Miller Fellow at Berkeley from 1981-83, and a junior faculty member at Harvard from 1983-86. He has been on the Berkeley faculty since 1986. He received Sloan and Presidential Young Investigator Awards, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Research Interests

What are the fundamental laws of nature, and how are they determined?

The standard model of particle physics, while very successful, leaves many fundamental questions unanswered. These questions frequently have to...

Oskar Hallatschek

Professor

Research: Biophysics Theory and Experiments

Research Interests

The complexity of the biological world demonstrates that chance can produce powerful results since evolution is ultimately driven by random mutational events. Numerous aspects of biology, such as genetic diversity, genome architecture or developmental pathways, are difficult to explain without an understanding of the effects of randomness in evolution. A large fraction of our research efforts aim at quantifying the inherently stochastic trajectory of biological systems using methods of statistical physics.

Our...

Wick Haxton

Professor

Wick Haxton received his B.A. from UC Santa Cruz in 1971 and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1976. He spent most of his early research career in the Los Alamos Theory Division, where he was a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow and later a staff member. He moved to the University of Washington in 1984 as Professor and, for 15 years, Director of the Department of Energy’s Institute for Nuclear Theory. In 2009 he joined UC Berkeley as Professor of Physics and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory as Senior Faculty Scientist. His research interests include neutrino physics, nuclear astrophysics, tests of...

Frances Hellman

Professor Emeritus 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...