Astrophysics Experimentalist

Steven Kahn

Dean of Mathematical & Physical Sciences, Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy
Steven M. Kahn is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy. He previously served on the faculty in these departments from 1984-98, but returned to Berkeley in 2022 to take up the position of Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Kahn received his A.B. (summa cum laude) from Columbia in 1975 and his Ph.D. in physics at Berkeley in 1980. In addition to Berkeley, he has served on the faculties of Columbia, where he was the I.I. Rabi Professor of Physics, and at Stanford, where he was the Cassius Lamb Kirk Professor in the Natural Sciences. Kahn is an experimental astrophysicist and cosmologist...

Stuart Bale Awarded AGU Fellowship

September 26, 2022

Stuart Bale in the lab

Berkeley Physics is delighted to announce that Professor Stuart Bale is among the 2022 Class of AGU Fellows.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) recognizes each awardee for their remarkable innovation and/or sustained scientific impact, as well as their efforts in fostering...

Herbert Steiner

Professor Emeritus

Herbert Steiner received his B.S. in Engineering Physics in 1951 and his Ph.D. in Physics in January 1956, both from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1956 to 1960 he was a research physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a lecturer in the Berkeley Department of Physics. After a year as a Guggenheim and Ford Foundation Fellow at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland he joined the Berkeley Physics faculty in 1961. He served as chairman of the Physics Department from 1992 to 1995. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the recipient of an Alexander von...

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...

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...

George Smoot III

Professor Emeritus

George Smoot received his Ph.D. in Physics from M.I.T. in 1970 and was a postdoctoral researcher at M.I.T. before moving to UC Berkeley in 1971. Honors include: NASA Medal for Exceptional Science Achievement, Kilby Award, Lawrence Award, Nobel Prize in Physics 2006.

Research Interests

2006 Nobel Prize winner-Experimental Astrophysicist George Smoot is an active researcher in observational astrophysics and cosmology. Smoot’s group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley is observing our galaxy and the cosmic background radiation that is a...

Marc Davis

Professor Emeritus

Marc Davis received his B.S. in 1969 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in 1973 from Princeton. After a lectureship at Princeton he was an assistant/associate Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University from 1975, and moved to Berkeley in 1981. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Science. He has been a Sloan Foundation Fellow and a Miller Professor.

Research Interests

My research is focused on...

William Chinowsky

Professor Emeritus

Professor of Physics, UC Berkeley, since 1961, Emeritus since 1993. A.B. from Columbia University; Ph.D. from Columbia University, 1955. Staff Physicist, Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1954-1961; Guggenheim Fellow, 1966-67, 1978-1979, Fellow, American Physical Society. Program Director, National Science Foundation, 1992-1996. Staff Senior Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

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...

Forrest Mozer

Professor Emeritus

Research: Astrophysics