Benjamin Safdi received his undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a Master of Advanced Study from Cambridge University, as a Churchill Scholar, and his PhD from Princeton University in 2014. He was then a Pappalardo Fellow in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 2017, when he started as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Safdi moved to LBNL in 2020 and then to UC Berkeley in 2021. He received the Department of Energy Early Career Award in 2018 and the IUPAP C11 Young Scientist Prize in Particles and Fields...
Raphael Bousso received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1998 and went on to become a Postdoc at Stanford University. He also worked at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. In 2002/03 he was a fellow at the Harvard University physics department and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In July 2003 he joined the physics department at UC Berkeley.
Research Interests
My interests are in theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity.
The central principles of quantum mechanics and of general relativity (our classical theory of gravity) come into...
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...
Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School
Wick Haxton received his B.A. from UC Santa Cruz in 1971 and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1976. He spent most of his early research career in the Los Alamos Theory Division, where he was a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow and later a staff member. He moved to the University of Washington in 1984 as Professor and, for 15 years, Director of the Department of Energy’s Institute for Nuclear Theory. In 2009 he joined UC Berkeley as Professor of Physics and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory as Senior Faculty Scientist. His research interests include neutrino physics, nuclear astrophysics, tests of...
Uros Seljak joined Berkeley as a faculty in 2008, jointly appointed with LBNL. He received his B.S. in 1989 and M.S. in 1991 from Ljubljana University, Slovenia and his PhD in 1995 from MIT. He was a Smithsonian Fellow at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1995 to 1998. Subsequently he served as a faculty at Princeton University, ICTP Trieste and Zurich University. He is the recipient of the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2000), the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2001), the Helen B. Warner award of American Astronomical Society (2001) and the NSF...
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...
Jonathan Arons earned his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard in 1970. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton University Observatory in 1970-71, and at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1971-72. He joined the Astronomy Department at UC Berkeley in 1972, and the Physics Department in 1980. Fellowships and honors include: Woodrow Wilson and Danforth Graduate Fellowships, 1965-70; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1980; Miller Professorships, 1985-86 and 2002-03; elected as an APS Fellow in 1984. He currently serves as Executive Director of the Miller Institute and as Director of the Theoretical...
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...
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...
