Faculty

Robert Littlejohn

Professor Emeritus

Robert Littlejohn received his B.A. in 1975 and his Ph.D. in 1980, both from the University of California at Berkeley. After postdoctoral positions at the La Jolla Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles, he joined the Berkeley faculty in 1983. He has been a Presidential Young Investigator and a Miller Professor, and he is a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Research Interests

I have broad interests in atomic, molecular, nuclear, optical, and plasma physics, and in nonlinear dynamics. I am especially interested in mathematical aspects of basic problems in...

Steven Louie

Professor Emeritus of the Graduate School

Steven G. Louie received his Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley in 1976. After having worked at the IBM Watson Research Center, Bell Laboratories, and University of Pennsylvania, he joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1980. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2005), fellow of the American Physical Society (1985), senior faculty scientist and Theory Facility Director of the Molecular Foundry at LBNL, and editor of the journal Solid State Communications. He has been awarded a Sloan Fellowship (1980), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), two Miller Professorships (1986, 1995), the U.S...

Kam-Biu Luk

Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School

Kam-Biu attended the University of Hong Kong from 1973 to 1976 where he received his B.Sc. in Physics. He went on to Rutgers University in 1977 and was awarded his Ph.D. in 1983. Then he did his postdoctoral research at the University of Washington in Seattle until 1986 when he went to Fermilab as an Associate Scientist. Professor Luk came to UC Berkeley/LBL in 1989. He received the R.R. Wilson Fellow of Fermilab in 1986-1989; won the Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator award in 1989-1991; received the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 1990-1994; a Miller Professor in the...

Chung-Pei Ma

Judy Chandler Webb Professor of Astronomy, Physics

C-P Ma received both her undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2002, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology and an Assistant and Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, where she won the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. Ma is an avid violin player and was an exchange student at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston while studying cosmic strings and theoretical cosmology at MIT. She was the first prize...

Eric Y. Ma

Assistant Professor

Eric Y. Ma received his B.S. in Physics from Peking University in 2010 and his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 2016. He stayed at Stanford as a joint postdoctoral scholar in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering. He was also briefly Senior Scientist at Apple. In July 2021 Dr. Ma joined UC Berkeley full-time as Assistant Professor in Physics and by courtesy EECS, and currently holds the Georgia Lee Chair in Physics.

Research Interests

Most practical phenomena, except those related to nuclear reactions, can be well described by atomic nuclei and electrons...

Raffaella Margutti

Associate Professor, Marc and Cristina Bensadoun Professor of Physics

Raffaella Margutti received her undergraduate degree in Astrophysics in 2006 (magna cum laude), and her PhD in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Milano Bicocca in 2010. Margutti is a Sloan Fellow in Physics (2019), a CIFAR global scholar in Gravity and the Extreme Universe (2019), and received the 2022 New Horizons in Physics Prize for leadership in laying foundations for electromagnetic observations of sources of gravitational waves, and leadership in extracting rich information from the first observed collision of two neutron stars.

Research Interests

Specialty...

Richard Marrus

Professor Emeritus

Richard Marrus received his B.S. from New York University in 1954, and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1959. He served as a postdoc and then as a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab until 1963. After an appointment as assistant professor of physics at New York University, he joined the UC Berkeley physics faculty in 1964. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and has been awarded an NSF senior scientist fellowship as well as a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1978 he received a U.S. Senior Scientist award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 1997 he was awarded an...

Christopher McKee

Professor Emeritus

Chris McKee received his Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley in 1970. After a brief stay at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he spent a year as a postdoc at Caltech. He then went to Harvard as an assistant professor of astronomy for three years, and in 1974 he joined the Physics and Astronomy Departments here at Berkeley. He served as the first Director of the Theoretical Astrophysics Center in 1985, and from 1985-1998 he directed the Space Sciences Laboratory. He was the Henry Norris Russell Lecturer of the American Astronomical Society in 2016 and appointed a Legacy...

Daniel McKinsey

Professor, The Georgia Lee Distinguished Professor of Physics

Daniel N. McKinsey joined the Physics Department faculty in July 2015. He received a B.S. in Physics with highest honors at the University of Michigan in 1995. His Ph.D. was awarded by Harvard University in 2002, with a thesis on the magnetic trapping, storage, and detection of ultracold neutrons in superfluid helium. His postdoctoral research was performed at Princeton University, and in 2003 he joined the Yale University physics department, where he was promoted to Full Professor in 2014. He was awarded a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering Fellowship and an Alfred P. Sloan...

Joel Moore

Professor

Joel Moore joined the physics department faculty as an assistant professor in January 2002. He received his A.B. summa cum laude in physics from Princeton University in 1995 and spent a Fulbright year abroad before graduate studies at MIT and a year at Bell Labs. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2022), a Simons Investigator (2013-2023), an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (2013), and Chern-Simons Professor. He is also a Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Research Interests

I am a theoretical physicist...