Associate Professor Benjamin Safdi with Dean of College of Letters and Science, Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences Steven Kahn. Photo by Keegan Houser
May 21, 2026
UC Berkeley's College of Letters & Science is proud to announce the recipients of the 2026 L&S Faculty Awards. This distinguished award recognizes each...
From left: UC Berkeley professors Doris Tsao, Raphael Bousso, P. David Pearson, Sarah Anzia, Kristin Persson, Michael Hutchings and Paolo Mancosu were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this week.
Studying the physics of atomic particles takes a lot of room. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest particle accelerator, is in a ring tunnel 27km (17 miles) long buried about two football fields deep underground. It serves as the factory, or artisanal manufacturer, of bespoke subatomic particles like quarks. But where is the design studio for these...
An artist's concept of a highly magnetized neutron star. According to current theory, axions would be created in the hot interior of the neutron star. UC Berkeley astrophysicists say that the strong magnetic field of the star will transform these axions into gamma rays that can be detected from Earth, pinpointing the mass of the axion. Image: Casey Reed, courtesy of Penn...
The sketch of modern physics’ conundrum that we in the general public have a hazy picture of hasn’t changed for a hundred years. The cat is both kicking and has kicked, the electron is zipping around but we can’t know both where it is and how quick it is going, the particles are mysteriously linked in ways that appear faster than the speed of light,...
Hitoshi Murayama speaks at the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) Town Hall Meeting at Berkeley Lab in February 2023. Paul Mueller, Berkeley Lab
Hitoshi Murayama has been elected to serve in the chair line of the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles & Fields.
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...
Assistant Professor and The Michael M. Garland Chair in Physics
Prof. Dai received a B.S. in Physics from Peking University in 2011. Later on, he earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the Johns Hopkins University in 2015 working on theoretical cosmology. From 2015 to 2018, he was awarded an NASA Einstein fellowship and was appointed a postdoctoral Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in the School of Natural Sciences. From 2018 to 2020, he was a long-term John Bahcall postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, before he joined the faculty in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
