Astrophysics Theorist

Dan Kasen

Professor

Prof. Kasen received his B.S. from Stanford University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley. Prior to returning to Cal, he was the Alan C. Davis fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a Hubble fellow at UC Santa Cruz. He joined the Berkeley physics faculty in 2010, jointly appointed with the nuclear science division at LBNL.

Liang Dai

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.

Research Interests

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M87 in 3D: New view of galaxy helps pin down mass of the black hole at its core

April 13, 2023

Image of a galaxy with a wire grid shape over it illustrating the M87 galaxy

Seen from Earth, the giant elliptical galaxy M87 is just a two-dimensional blob, though one that appears perfectly symmetrical and thus a favored target of amateur astronomers.
Yet, a new, highly detailed analysis of the motion of stars around its central supermassive black hole — the first black hole to be imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope...

Bright gamma ray burst confounds models of black hole birth

March 28, 2023

Diagram of a gamma ray emission emerging from a black hole showing the different types of energy in the afterglow

Last October, following one of the brightest flashes of gamma rays ever observed in the sky, telescopes around the world captured a wealth of data from an event that is thought to herald the collapse of a massive star and the birth of a black hole.

But that fire hose of data demonstrated clearly that...

Martin White

Professor

Martin White received his B.S. in 1988 from the University of Adelaide and his Ph.D. in 1992 from Yale. After postdoctoral positions at the CfPA in Berkeley and an Enrico Fermi Fellowship in Chicago he became Assistant Professor of Physics and of Astronomy at UIUC. In 1998 he became an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Harvard before moving to Berkeley as a Professor of Physics in 2001.

Research Interests

I am a theorist and phenomenologist. While I originally trained in Particle Physics, in the last few years my interest has centered around the question of the formation of...

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...