BCCP Homepage Academy Activity Instructors For Students For Teachers For Berkeley Lab Staff Facilities Center for Science and Engineering EducationAcademy Homepage

Dr. George F. Smoot – The CMB Story

Dr. Smoot received his Ph.D. in Physics from MIT. He is Professor of Physics at the University of California Berkeley and leads the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics with research facilities at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Smoot is most famous for his research on the cosmic background radiation. An author of more than 200 science papers and co-author of the book Wrinkles in Time, he was co-awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Dr. Eric Linder – Antimatter in the Universe

Dr. Eric Linder is a theoretical physicist specializing in cosmology and gravitation, and author of "First Principles of Cosmology".  He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University in 1987 and is currently head of the Theory Group for the SNAP satellite project, which aims to use supernovae and gravitational lensing to measure the evolution of the universe and its contents.  He is also a member of the Contemporary Physics Education Project, which aims to educate general audiences about modern physics.

Dr. Nao Suzuki– Tour of the Universe

Dr. Suzuki received his Ph.D. from UCSD on cosmological parameter measurements including the first three minutes of the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Dr. Suzuki is currently an astrophysics postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and working on the deepest Hubble Telescope Images to perform precise measurements of the accelerating universe.

Nikhil Padmanabhan– Dark Matter and Dark Energy

Dr. Padmanabhan received his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University in 2006. He is currently a Hubble Fellow, as well as a Chamberlain Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Padmanabhan’s current research interests include the large-scale structure of universe, formation and clustering of galaxies, weak lensing, and cosmological probes of dark matter.

Dr. Stewart Loken – Particles and Interactions

Dr. Stewart Loken received his Ph.D. in High Energy Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1971. Currently, he is a Senior Scientist and Deputy Director of the Physics Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  His research interests include the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and studies of nearby Type Ia Supernovae.  Additionally, he is the Lead for the QuarkNet program at Berkeley Lab.

Ayana Holloway Arce - Elementary Particle Interactions

Dr. Holloway is a Chamberlain Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She concentrates on experimental techniques to identify and measure the properties of heavy unstable elementary particles such as the top quark, in order to search for unexpected interactions. She is currently involved in the preparation of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

Alexie Leauthaud - Gravitational Lensing

Dr. Alexie Leauthaud is a Chamberlain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). She received her PhD from the University of Provence (France) in 2008. Her research is focused around understanding the relationship between galaxies and dark matter by using a technique known as weak gravitational lensing. She has been heavily involved in the COSMOS survey, which has imaged a large contiguous patch of sky using the Hubble Space Telescope.

Reiko Nakajima - Gravitational Lensing

Dr. Nakajima received her Ph.D. in Physics and Astronomy from University of Pennsylvania in 2008.  She is currently a postdoctoral scholar located in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  Dr. Nakajima's research interests are dark matter and dark energy in cosmology, and her current research includes weak gravitational lensing as a cosmological probe, and development of the weak lensing technique.

Mia (Catherine) Ihm– Gravitational Lensing

Mia Ihm received her undergraduate degree in Physics with honors in 2005 from Northwestern University. She has been awarded a fellowship by the National Science Foundation and is a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Mia’s research interests include gravitational lensing, dark matter, and the search for cosmic strings.

Kevin Lesko – Neutrino Experiments

Dr. Lesko received his PhD. from U Washington in 1983. He worked for 2 years at Argonne National Laboratory in nuclear and neutrino physics. In 1985, he worked in nuclear astrophysics in Berkeley before joining the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in 1989, and KamLAND in 1999, where he pursued neutrino physics solving the solar neutrino problem and firmly establishing neutrino flavor oscillations and neutrino mass.  He is head of the Neutrino Astrophysics Group within the Institute of Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics; Neutrino Head within the Nuclear Science Division; and Co-Director of the Institute of Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics. He is the Principal Investigator for the NSF's Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL).