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Committee and Staff Biographical Information

GORDON BAYM, Co-Chair, is research professor and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Baym received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Cornell University in 1956, his A.M. in mathematics from Harvard in 1957, and his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1960. He joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois as an assistant professor in 1963, where he has been since. Professor Baym has been a leader in the study of matter under extreme conditions in astrophysics and nuclear physics. He has made original, seminal contributions to our understanding of neutron stars, relativistic effects in nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, quantum fluids, and ultracold atomic systems. His work is characterized by a superb melding of basic theoretical physics concepts, from condensed matter to nuclear to elementary particle physics. Professor Baym is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), where he served as chair of the Physics Section from 1995-1998, and the American Philosophical Society, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society (APS), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has received numerous awards and honors, including the Hans A. Bethe Prize of the APS in 2002 “for his superb synthesis of fundamental concepts which have provided an understanding of matter at extreme conditions, ranging from crusts and interiors of neutron stars to matter at ultrahigh temperature,” and he shared the Lars Onsager Prize of the APS in 2008 “for fundamental applications of statistical physics to quantum fluids, including Fermi liquid theory and ground-state properties of dilute quantum gases, and for bringing a conceptual unity to these areas.” He has served on numerous National Academies of Sciences,

Engineering, and Medicine committees (in addition to many such committees outside the National Academies), including the Board on Physics and Astronomy, the Committee on an Assessment and Outlook for Nuclear Physics, the Committee on AMO2010, the Committee on Burning Plasma Assessment, the Committee on Nuclear Physics, and the Committee on Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Sciences.

ANI APRAHAMIAN, Co-Chair, is a professor of experimental nuclear physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Notre Dame. She received her Ph.D. from Clark University in 1986. Professor Aprahamian’s research focuses on the study of nuclear structure effects (shapes, masses, decay lifetimes, and probabilities) and how they can influence stellar evolution as well as explosive astrophysical scenarios such as accretion disks of binary neutron star systems or shock fronts of core collapse supernova. Professor Aprahamian is the secretary general of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Commission on Nuclear Physics (C-12) and a member of the AstroParticle Commission (C-10). She was vice chair of the Committee on an Assessment and Outlook for Nuclear Physics (the 2010 nuclear physics decadal survey). She has served as co-chair of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Nuclear Science Advisory Committee’s (NSAC) subcommittee on isotope production and applications, and has been a National Science Foundation (NSF) program director for nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics. She was chair of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics from 2014-2016. Professor Aprahamian is a member of the NSF-funded Frontier Center on Nuclear Astrophysics: The Joint Institute of Nuclear Astrophysics Center for the Evolution of the Elements, the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) Science Advisory Committee, as well as numerous other international advisory committees. She is a fellow of the AAAS and the APS, and an elected foreign member of the Science Academy of the Republic of Armenia.

CHRISTINE AIDALA is an associate professor of physics at the University of Michigan. She obtained her bachelor’s in physics from Yale University in 1999 and her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2005. She works in experimental high-energy nuclear physics, on the border between nuclear and particle physics. Her research is focused on nucleon structure and quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong force. She is particularly interested in spin-momentum correlations inside the proton, loosely analogous to the quantum electrodynamical spin-orbit and spin-spin couplings in the hydrogen atom. She currently carries out her research as part of three international collaborations, working on the fixed-target E906/SeaQuest experiment at Fermilab since 2010 as well as the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) since 2001, the fixed-target E906/SeaQuest experiment at Fermilab since 2010, and the LHCb experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) since 2017. She joined the faculty of University of

Michigan in 2012. She has served on the executive committee of the APS Topical Group on Hadronic Physics and the program committee of the Division of Nuclear Physics and has worked extensively in the field of physics for minority causes and public outreach.

PETER BRAUN-MUNZINGER is the scientific director of the ExtreMe Matter Institute at GSI. He received his B.S. in physics from Heidelberg University in 1970 and his Ph.D. in 1972. His research focuses on the use of heavy-ion accelerators for studies of nuclear physics and particle physics. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg from 1973-1976 and was on the faculty of the University of Stony Brook from 1976-1995. From 1984-1999, he was spokesperson of AGS experiments E814 and E877. From 1996-2011, he was on the faculty of the Technical University of Darmstadt as full professor and at GSI Darmstadt as leading scientist. From 2011-2014, he was the Helmholtz Professor. He was the project leader of the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) of ALICE at CERN from 1998-2010 and from 2011-2016 has been chair of the ALICE collaboration board. He is a fellow of the APS and a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2014, he received the Lise Meitner Prize for Nuclear Physics of the European Physical Society. In 2015, he was appointed Honorary Professor at the University of Heidelberg.

HAIYAN GAO is a professor of physics at Duke University and vice chancellor for academic affairs at Duke Kunshan University in China. She received her B.S. in physics from Tsinghua University in 1988 and her Ph.D. in physics from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1994. Her research interests cover structure of the nucleon, search for QCD exotics, fundamental symmetry studies at low energy, and the developments of polarized targets. She was on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1997-2002 before she joined the physics faculty of Duke in 2002 and became a full professor in 2008. She was named the Henry Newson Professor of Physics in 2012 at Duke. She was the chair of the Physics Department from 2011 to 2014 and has been the vice chancellor for academic affairs at Duke Kunshan University since January 2015. She is a fellow of the APS. She chaired and co-chaired many workshops and conferences, and she has served on many international advisory committees and panels and a number of editorial boards of journals.

KAWTAR HAFIDI is the director of the Physics Division at Argonne National Laboratory. She received her B.S. in theoretical physics from Mohammed V University in Morocco in 1995 and her Ph.D. in physics from Paris Sud University in France in 1999. She conducts experimental research into QCD in the strong (nonperturbative) regime. She was a postdoctoral appointee at Argonne National

Laboratory from 1999 to 2002 and eventually became an assistant and full physicist in 2002 and 2006 respectively. She was named the associate chief scientist in 2015. From 2013-2014, she was a detailee to the DOE Office of Nuclear Physics. She conducts her experiments at Jefferson Lab, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), and Fermilab. She is a fellow of the APS and currently a member of the DOE NSAC. She has chaired/co-chaired a number of conferences and workshops and served on numerous international advisory committees.

WICK HAXTON is a professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Dr. Haxton received his B.A. from UC Santa Cruz in 1971 and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1976. His research interests include neutrino physics, nuclear astrophysics, tests of fundamental symmetries, and many-body theory. 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, was director of DOE’s Institute for Nuclear Theory there. In 2009, he joined UC Berkeley as professor of physics and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) as a senior faculty scientist. He is a member of the NAS and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Washington State Academy of Sciences, the AAAS, and the APS. He received the Hans Bethe Prize from the APS in 2004. He has held visiting fellowships from the Guggenheim, Miller, and Alexander von Humboldt Foundations and the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

JOHN JOWETT is a principal accelerator physicist at CERN. He received a B.Sc. in mathematical physics from the University of Edinburgh in 1976 and a master’s and a Ph.D. in mathematical and theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge. He joined CERN to take up particle accelerator physics in 1980 and developed a special interest in the effects of strong synchrotron radiation on high-energy electron beams. He contributed to the feasibility study of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 1983 and worked on many aspects of the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP) and other electron-positron colliders (including a year at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center [SLAC]) until the late 1990s. He designed and commissioned the LEP “pretzel” luminosity upgrade. He has been responsible for heavy-ion beams in the LHC since 2003 and led the commissioning of lead-lead and proton-lead collisions. He has supervised a number of students and served on many international advisory and review committees, including, in the United States, an NSAC subcommittee on relativistic heavy-ion physics and chairing the Collider-Accelerator Department’s Machine Advisory Committee at BNL. He is a fellow of the APS, past chair of the ICFA Beam Dynamics Panel, past member of the editorial board of Physical Review Accelerators and Beams, and present member of the High Energy and Particle Physics Board of the European Physical Society.

LARRY McLERRAN is the director of the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington. He received his B.S. in physics from University of Washington in 1971 and his Ph.D. in 1975. His research focuses on hot and dense matter and high-energy nuclear physics. He was theory group leader at the Brookhaven Research Center at BNL from 2003-2015. Previously, he had worked as a research associate at SLAC and MIT and has taught at University of Washington, University of Illinois, University of Minnesota, and the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics. He has received numerous accolades and awards. He is a fellow of the APS and foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellow in 1983. He received the Alexander von Humboldt Prize in 1988 and the Brookhaven Science and Technology Award in 2007, among others. He has served on numerous committees, including the DOE’s Nuclear Science Advisory Committee.

LIA MERMINGA is project director of PIP-II, the SRF proton linac under development at Fermilab, that will deliver high-intensity beams to LBNF/DUNE and future physics experiments. Prior to this appointment, she was associate laboratory director for accelerators at SLAC and professor at Stanford University, and before that she was head of the Accelerator Division at TRIUMF, Canada. She is a member of the Scientific Council of DESY, the Jefferson Science Associates Science Council, and the Scientific Advisory Council of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin. She has served on three U.S. National Academies committees, on the P5 panel, the 2007 NSAC Long Range Plan Writing Group, and the Physical Review Accelerators and Beams Editorial Board. Dr. Merminga is a fellow of the APS and is chair of the IUPAP Working Group on Accelerator Science.

ZEIN-EDDINE MEZIANI is a professor of physics at Temple University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in theoretical physics from the University of Algiers, and his master’s and doctoral degrees in nuclear and particle physics from the University of Paris XI, Orsay, France. Dr. Meziani joined Temple from Stanford University in 1993 after starting his spin structure studies of the neutron and proton at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He has become a leading researcher in trying to understand the spin structure of the neutron while conducting the majority of his research at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia. He co-chaired a 2007 town meeting to help set the priorities of the DOE’s Division of Nuclear Physics and was at the forefront of the effort to upgrade the Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. He is a fellow of the APS and has published numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals.

RICHARD MILNER is a professor of physics at MIT and has worked there since 1988. He did his undergraduate studies at University College Cork, Ireland, and

received his Ph.D. in 1985 from Caltech. His research focuses on understanding nucleon and nuclear structure using the lepton probe, frequently using spin observables. He has proposed and led experiments at SLAC, IUCF, MIT, DESY, and Jefferson Lab. He has served as director of the MIT-Bates Linear Accelerator Center from 1998 to 2006 and director of MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science from 2006 to 2015. He has served on numerous international advisory committees, was chair of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the APS in 2007, and served as chair of the International Spin Physics Committee from 2014 to 2017. He is a fellow of the APS and recipient of an award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany.

THOMAS SCHAEFER is the Wesley O. Doggett distinguished professor of physics at North Carolina State University, a member of the Nuclear Theory Group at North Carolina State, and a former fellow at the RIKEN-BNL Research Center. He received his bachelor’s in physics at the University of Giessen in 1989 and his Ph.D. from the University of Regensburg in 1992. His work is focused on QCD, many body effects in atomic, nuclear, and particle physics, as well as transport theory. From 1998-1999 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before joining the faculty at Stony Brook University as an assistant professor in 2000. He was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 2003 and joined the faculty of North Carolina State University the same year. He was promoted to full professor in 2006. From 2000-2004, he was also a fellow at the Riken-BNL research center at BNL. Dr. Schaefer received a Fedor Lynen Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1992, an Outstanding Junior Investigator Award from DOE in 2002, and was elected a fellow of the APS in 2006. He served as an associate editor of Physical Review Letters.

ERNST SICHTERMANN is a senior scientist at LBNL. He received his master’s in physics from Utrecht University and his Ph.D. in physics from Vrije Unversiteit Amsterdam in 2001 on research performed with the Spin Muon Collaboration at CERN. He then took a postdoctoral position at Yale University, where he studied the precision measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of positive and negative muons with experiment E821 at BNL. He joined LBNL as a division fellow in 2003 and was promoted to senior scientist in early 2009. At LBNL, he pursues spin measurements in collisions of high-energy polarized protons with the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and its collaboration, of which he was a deputy spokesperson. Recent STAR data have revealed that gluon polarization forms an essential part of nucleon spin structure and that the polarizations of antiquarks are flavor-asymmetric. He was elected a fellow of the APS in 2017.

MICHAEL TURNER is the Rauner Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. He

earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1978 and his B.S. from Caltech in 1971. Dr. Turner’s research focuses on the application of modern ideas in elementary particle theory to cosmology and astrophysics. He is a member of the NAS and has made seminal contributions to the current cosmological paradigm, known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter. From 2003 to 2006, Dr. Turner was the assistant director for mathematical and physical sciences at NSF. He chaired the National Academies’ Committee on the Physics of the Universe, which in 2003 published Connecting Quarks with the Cosmos. He has served on numerous other National Academies committees, including the past two astronomy and astrophysics decadal surveys, and is currently a member of DEPSCOM.