Assistant Professor Raúl Briceño and Associate Professor Raffaela Margutti
Two Berkeley Physics faculty members were among the nearly 400 scientists and engineers awarded by President Biden to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers...
Mark Strovink, Ph.D. 1970 (Princeton). Joined UC Berkeley faculty in 1973 (Professor since 1980). Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society; served as program advisor for Fermilab (chair), SLAC (chair), Brookhaven, and the U.S. Department of Energy; served as D0 Physics Coordinator (1997 and 1998).
Research Interests
After 40 years in elementary particle physics, in late 2004 I turned my attention to the unexplained force that accelerates the universe's expansion. As an experimentalist, I am interested in understanding how best to standardize Type Ia supernovae (SNe) as...
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...
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.
The James Webb Space Telescope; tracks of stars photographed as earth rotates. JWST credit: NASA/Chris Gunn; star rotation image credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/AURA
A global team of astronomers and machine learning researchers today announced the release of the "Multimodal Universe" - a groundbreaking 100 terabyte dataset that brings together hundreds of millions of astronomical...
Matt Pyle received B.S. in Physics (2001) and B.E. in Aerospace Engineering (2002) from the University of Notre Dame, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University (2012). Subsequently, he crossed the bay and was a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley. He joined the Berkeley Physics faculty as the Garland Assistant Professor in 2015.
Research Interests
Many of the questions that we would like to ask about the nature of the universe today, for example "could dark matter be composed of particles with mass less than that of a proton?", are simply impossible to answer with present...
Adrian Lee joined the faculty in July 2000. He received his B.A. in physics from Columbia University in 1986 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1993. At Stanford, he worked with Blas Cabrera on the early development of an experiment to detect non-baryonic dark matter. Following graduate school, Lee became a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford Medical School, where he worked on mapping functions in the human brain using magnetic resonance imaging. Subsequently, from 1994 to 2000, he did postdoctoral work at U.C. Berkeley with Paul Richards measuring spatial anisotropy in the 2.7 K cosmic...
The purple and white emissions at the top are referred to as "Steve," while the green emissions are called "picket fence." The rare phenomena, which are distinct from the typical aurora, often occur together and may be caused by similar conditions at the edge of space. The photo was taken looking south over Berg Lake toward Mt. Robson in the Canadian...
The Andromeda Galaxy, M31, looks much different in optical (left) versus ultraviolet wavelengths. UVEX will conduct an all-sky survey to find UV sources, searching in particular for hot binary stars in low-mass galaxies surrounding the Milky Way and for the signatures of exploding stars. Optical: Adam Block/NOAO/AURA/NSF; UV: GALEX/JPL/NASA...
