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.
Lawrence Hall received his B.A. from Oxford in 1977 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1981. He was a Miller Fellow at Berkeley from 1981-83, and a junior faculty member at Harvard from 1983-86. He has been on the Berkeley faculty since 1986. He received Sloan and Presidential Young Investigator Awards, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Research Interests
What are the fundamental laws of nature, and how are they determined?
The standard model of particle physics, while very successful, leaves many fundamental questions unanswered. These questions frequently have to...
The future of particle physics in the U.S. hinges on what Hitoshi Murayama, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and 30 other members of the Particle Physics Projects Prioritization Panel (P5) decide later this summer.
Professor, Former Director, Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU), University of Tokyo
Hitoshi Murayama is a well-known theoretical particle physicist who works broadly, even on astrophysics, cosmology, and condensed matter physics. He has been a professor in the University of California, Berkeley, since 2000, and is also the founding director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) at the University of Tokyo, serving from 2007 to 2018. Born in Japan, lived in Germany for four years and in the US for 21 years, served on advisory committees around the world, he is a multicultural global denizen. In October 2014, he was invited to...
Raúl Briceño was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. In 2013, he received his PhD in Physics from the University of Washington. He then joined the Center for Theoretical and Computational Physics at Jefferson Lab as a postdoc. After three years as a postdoc, in 2016 he became the Nathan Isgur Research Fellow at Jefferson Lab. Shortly after, in 2017 he started an Assistant Professor position at Old Dominion University with a joint appointment at Jefferson Lab as a Staff Scientist. His research largely focuses on aspects of theoretical nuclear and particle physics. In 2023, he joined the...
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...
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...
Mina Aganagic received her BS (1995) and PhD (1999) degrees from California Institute of Technology. From 1999-2003 she had a postdoctoral appointment at Harvard University. She was an Assistant Professor of Physics and an Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington, Seattle from 2003-4. In 2004 she was appointed Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the University of California Berkeley. She was promoted to an Associate Professor in 2008, and to Professor in 2012.
Professor, Director, Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics
Yasunori Nomura received his Ph.D. from University of Tokyo in 2000, where he held a fellowship of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He was a Miller Research Fellow at University of California, Berkeley from 2000 to 2002, and an Associate Scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory from 2002 to 2003. He joined the Berkeley physics faculty in July 2003. Awards and honors include: DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator Award (2004), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2005), Hellman Fellow (2005), Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics (2012), and American Physical Society...
