Faculty

Forrest Mozer

Professor Emeritus

Research: Astrophysics

Holger Mueller

Professor

Holger Müller successfully applied for his first patent when he was 14. Later, he did his undergraduate thesis with Jürgen Mlynek at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He graduated from Humboldt-University, Berlin, with Achim Peters as his advisor. Müller received a fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation and joined the group of Steven Chu in Stanford as a postdoc. In July 2008, he joined the physics faculty at U.C. Berkeley.

Research Interests

Our research has been advancing atomic, molecular and optical physics to probe nature at the utmost sensitivity. Examples are...

Richard Muller

Professor Emeritus

Richard A. Muller received his A. B. degree from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. at Berkeley working under Luis Alvarez. He has been on the faculty at Berkeley since 1978. He is a fellow of the APS and of the AAAS, and his awards include the Texas Instruments Founders Prize, the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award, and a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship.

Research Interests

I received my Ph.D. in elementary particle physics, but have since moved into astrophysics (anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background; supernovae for cosmology) and geophysics (origin of the earth’s magnetic...

Hitoshi Murayama

Professor, Former Director, Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU), University of Tokyo

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 Neaton

Professor

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...

Yasunori Nomura

Professor, Director, Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics

Yasunori Nomura received his Ph.D. from University of Tokyo in 2000, where he held a fellowship of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He was a Miller Research Fellow at University of California, Berkeley from 2000 to 2002, and an Associate Scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory from 2002 to 2003. He joined the Berkeley physics faculty in July 2003. Awards and honors include: DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator Award (2004), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2005), Hellman Fellow (2005), Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics (2012), and American Physical Society...

Joseph Orenstein

Professor

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...

Richard Packard

Professor Emeritus

Professor Packard received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Michigan in 1969. After a postdoctoral appointment at the University of California at Berkeley he was appointed to the faculty in 1971. Fellowships and honors include: The Donald Sterling Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, Fulbright Scholar and several visiting professorships at universities abroad.

Research Interests

Condensed Matter Physics, Experimental Low Temperature Physics, Quantum Liquids, Nanophysics...

Geoff Penington

Assistant Professor

Geoff Penington received his BA+MMath in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University in 2015, and his PhD in Physics, with Patrick Hayden, from Stanford University in 2020. He joined UC Berkeley in July 2020.

Research Interests

My research focuses on using ideas from the theory behind quantum computers (and, more generally, quantum information) in order to make progress in our understanding of the quantum mechanics of gravity. In particular, I have recently been working on understanding how the information that falls into a black hole ends up being encoded in the Hawking radiation...

Saul Perlmutter

Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Professor

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...