Professor of Mathematics and Physics, Chern-Simons Distinguished Chair in Mathematical Physics
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.
Luca Iliesiu received his BA in Physics from Princeton University in 2015. He remained there for his PhD which he received in 2020. He was then appointed as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he was part of the Simons Ultra Quantum Matter Collaboration, before starting as an assistant professor at Berkeley in January 2024.
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...
Petr Horava received his Ph.D. in 1991 at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. He was awarded the Robert McCormick Research Fellowship at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, worked as a Research Associate at Princeton University, and won a Sherman Fairchild Senior Research Fellowship at Caltech, before joining the New High Energy Theory Center at Rutgers University in 2000 as an Associate Professor. In 1997, he was awarded the Junior Prize of the Czech Learned Society, and in 1999 he appeared on the list of top three scientists of the...
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...
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...
Ori Ganor received his B.Sc. in 1988 and his Ph.D. in 1996, both from Tel-Aviv University. He was a Robert H. Dicke fellow from 1996 until 1998 and an assistant professor from 1998 until 2001 at Princeton University. He joined the UC Berkeley Physics faculty as an associate professor in 2002.
Research Interests
My general field of research is String Theory, which is an umbrella term for a worldwide effort in theoretical high-energy physics, ranging from a quest for the fundamental Laws of Nature, looking at gravity under extreme conditions, applications and new models for particle...
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...
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...
