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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographies of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. An Assessment of the Science Proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13204.
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C
Biographies of Committee Members

Andrew J. Lankford, Chair, is professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California at Irvine. He received both his undergraduate and graduate education at Yale University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1978. After serving as staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the Stanford Linear Accelerator, Dr. Lankford joined the faculty at the University of California at Irvine in 1990 and served as department chair from 2002 to 2007. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society. His current research activities are in elementary particle physics and include a leading role in the ATLAS collaboration at CERN. Dr. Lankford is the deputy spokesperson for ATLAS and is on its executive board. ATLAS is an experiment being performed at the Large Hadron Collider by a collaboration of more than 3,000 physicists and engineers participating from 174 universities and laboratories in 38 countries. Dr. Lankford has served on numerous advisory and assessment committees and was on the NRC Committee on NASA’s Beyond Einstein Program: An Architecture for Implementation.

Yoram Alhassid is professor of physics at the Center for Theoretical Physics, Yale University. He is an accomplished theoretical physicist who has made numerous contributions and has broad expertise in the fields of many-body nuclear theory, mesoscopic physics, and nanoscience. In particular, he has developed novel methods for understanding the statistical properties of quantum many-body systems, including atomic nuclei and quantum dots. Dr. Alhassid received the Aharon Katzir prize, awarded to one doctoral recipient for excellence in natural sciences in Israel.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographies of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. An Assessment of the Science Proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13204.
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He was a Chaim Weizmann fellow at the California Institute of Technology and was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship in physics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award, given for his contributions to many-body theory in nuclear and mesoscopic physics. Dr. Alhassid was a scientific director of two programs at the Max Planck Institute, Dresden, Germany: “Dynamics of Complex Systems” and “Electrons in Zero-Dimensional Conductors: Beyond the Single-Particle Picture.” He served as the lead organizer of two interdisciplinary summer programs at the intersection of nuclear physics and condensed matter physics at the Institute of Nuclear Theory, University of Washington, Seattle: “Chaos and Interactions: From Nuclei to Quantum Dots” and “From Femtoscience to Nanoscience: Nuclei, Quantum Dots and Nanostructures.” Most recently he served on a review panel for the DOE Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, reviewing proposals in nuclear, particle, and cold atom physics. Dr. Alhassid has published over 200 papers.

Eugenio Coccia is professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Rome, “Tor Vergata.” He is a distinguished experimental physicist with expertise in astroparticle physics, with a focus on the detection of gravitational waves, as well as interests in cryogenic experiments for neutrinoless double-beta decay and in the development of detectors of cosmic rays. For 6 years Dr. Coccia directed the Gran Sasso Laboratory of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). He has been chair of the Astroparticle Physics Scientific Committee of INFN and president of the Italian Society of General Relativity and Gravitational Physics. Dr. Coccia is a member of the International GRG Society, the Italian Physical Society, the IUPAP-affiliated Particle and Nuclear Astrophysics and Gravitation International Committee (PANAGIC), and the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC). He has been chair of the Coordination Management of European Underground Laboratories (CoMag), and a member of the European Committee for Future Accelerators (ECFA), of the CERN Strategy Group on Particle Physics, and of the OECD Astroparticle Physics working group of the Global Science Forum.

Charles Fairhurst, Itasca Consulting Group, Inc., (NAE) is professor emeritus in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Fairhurst received his education at the University of Sheffield, England. His current research specialties are the mechanics of rock fracture and rock masses, the determination of in situ stresses in rock masses, and rock mechanics and related technical issues in the geological isolation of high-level nuclear waste. Dr. Fairhurst served as president of the International Society for Rock Mechanics (1991-1995) and as a member of the board of governors for the Geo-Institute of the ASCE (1998-2001). Among his many awards are membership in the Royal Swedish Academy of

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographies of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. An Assessment of the Science Proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13204.
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Engineering Sciences; the AIME Outstanding Achievement Award, Rock Mechanics; the Pergamon Medal from the American Underground Space Association; and honorary degrees from the National Institute of Lorraine, France, and the St. Petersburg Mining Academy and Technical University, Russia. Dr. Fairhurst has served on a number of National Academies committees and studies and as the NAE Section 11 Liaison until October 5, 2010.

Bradley W. Filippone is professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology. His research focus is experimental nuclear physics and has included nuclear astrophysics and high-energy electron scattering from nucleons and nuclei. Recently he has focused on physics beyond the Standard Model in free neutron beta decay and on the search for the neutron’s electric dipole moment. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and has served on the NRC Committee on Theory and Laboratory Astrophysics (1989-1990) and the NRC Committee on Nuclear Physics (1996-1998), as well as on numerous review panels for the National Science Foundation and the Office of Science of the Department of Energy.

Peter Fisher is professor of physics and division head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Particle and Nuclear Experimental Physics Division. He received a B.S. in engineering physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983 and a Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1988. His research focuses on the experimental detection of dark matter using a new kind of detector with directional sensitivity. His other projects include neutrino physics, wireless power transfer, pedagogical work on electromagnetic radiation and development of new kinds of particle detectors.

Takaaki Kajita is director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research at the University of Tokyo and a principal investigator at the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe. His research mainly involves participation in the Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande experiments studying atmospheric neutrinos and neutrino oscillations. Among his many awards and honors are the Asahi Prize (as a member of the Super-Kamiokande collaboration) for the study of the neutrino mass, the Nishina Memorial Prize for the discovery of the atmospheric neutrino anomaly, and the American Physical Society’s W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics.

Stephen E. Laubach is a senior research scientist and the Jackson Research Excellence Fellow at the Bureau of Economic Geology, Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin. He is a geologist with expertise in structure, fractures, diagenesis, fluid flow, and rock mechanics, as well as chemical and mechanical interactions in the deep subsurface. Dr. Laubach was awarded the Jules Braunstein

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographies of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. An Assessment of the Science Proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13204.
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Memorial Award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 1999 for research on novel methods to assess fractures in the subsurface. He served as a member of the NRC Committee on Advanced Drilling Technologies from 1992 to 1994. He co-chaired the first North American Rock Mechanics Symposium in 1994. Dr. Laubach was a distinguished lecturer for the Society of Petroleum Engineers in 2004 and a member of the Geological Society of America Panel on Energy and Mineral Resources Policy in 2007 and 2008. He is the elected editor of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and a member of its executive committee.

Ann Nelson is a professor of physics at the University of Washington studying elementary particle theory. Her current research interests include the theory and phenomenology of physics beyond the Standard Model. Some of the principal consequences of such a theory would be explored in several of the experiments being considered at DUSEL, including neutrino oscillation, dark matter, and neutrinoless double-beta decay studies. Among the theories on which Dr. Nelson is working are spontaneous violation of CP (charge conjugation and parity symmetry), which may explain the origin of the asymmetry observed between matter and antimatter; the Little Higgs theory, which may explain why the Higgs boson must be relatively light; and the theory of “accelerons,” which relates neutrino masses to the cosmological dark energy responsible for the relatively recent acceleration of the expansion of the Universe. Dr. Nelson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004.

Rene A. Ong is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is an experimental and observational astrophysicist working in gamma-ray astronomy and cosmic ray physics, using both ground-based and spaceborne instruments. He is also involved in the search for dark matter using indirect detection methods. Dr. Ong is currently the spokesperson for the Veritas gamma-ray telescope array. He was an A.P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He participated in two panels of the 2000 NRC Decadal Survey in Astronomy and Astrophysics and served as a member of the NRC Neutrino Facilities Assessment Committee and the recently completed Particle Astrophysics and Gravitation Panel for the Astronomy 2010 survey. Dr. Ong has been a member of numerous advisory committees for funding agencies and national laboratories, including the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee, the High-Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP), the Experimental Program Advisory Committee for SLAC, and the Conseil Scientifique for the Laboratoire Leprince Ringuet of the Ecole Polytechnique. He chaired the Scientific Assessment Group for Experiments in Non-Accelerator Physics, a HEPAP subpanel, in 2004. Dr. Ong serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the European AStroParticle ERAnet (ASPERA) group.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographies of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. An Assessment of the Science Proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13204.
×

Frank J. Sciulli (NAS) is the Pupin Professor of Physics Emeritus at Columbia University. He is an experimental physicist with a broad career encompassing measurements of K-mesons corroborating quark selection rules, leading collaborations in measurements of neutrino interactions with nucleons that demonstrated the existence of neutral weak currents and the quark-gluon constituency of nucleons; and leading the U.S. effort on the ZEUS program involving colliding beam experiments with high-energy electrons and protons. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was the recipient of the Humboldt Foundation Research Award and of the American Physical Society W.K.H. Panofsky Prize. He has served as chair of the Columbia Physics Department, has chaired two subpanels of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel and served on a third, chaired the Science Policy Committee at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and served on the Extended Science Council at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron. He has also served on two NRC committees: Neutrinos and Beyond and Connecting Quarks with the Cosmos. He was recently co-chair of the Sanford Laboratory Program Advisory Committee and is presently on the board of directors for the Fermi Research Alliance, the management organization for Fermilab, and chairs its Physics Committee.

Marjorie Shapiro is a senior faculty member in the Physics Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley. She is an experimental physicist with broad expertise in particle physics. She is a member of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN and is a former collaborator on the Collider Detector at Fermilab. Dr. Shapiro served as a member of the P5 Panel for the Prioritrization of Particle Physics Projects for DOE and NSF in 2003 and 2004 and in 2008, the HEPAP Subpanel on Planning for the Future of U.S. High Energy Physics in 1997 and 1998, the NSF Special Emphasis Panel on Experimental Particle Physics in 1995, the NSF Review Panel on Particle Physics in 1996, and the NRC Committee on Experimental Particle Physics from 1995 to 1997. She served on the CESR Program Advisory Committee (1994-1996), the SLAC Scientific Policy Committee (1995-1998), HEPAP (1997-2000), and the Fermilab Research Associates Visiting Committee for Fermilab Scientific Programs (2009-2011). She has served on numerous visiting committees to physics departments, including Harvard, Toronto, Carnegie-Mellon, University of California at Santa Barbara, UCLA, and the University of California at Riverside and was a member of the external review committee for the Harvard University Planning Committee on Science and Engineering Report on the Future of Science at Harvard in 2006. Dr. Shapiro is a fellow of the American Physical Society. She served as chair of the Berkeley Physics Department from June 2004 through June 2007.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographies of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. An Assessment of the Science Proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13204.
×

James M. Tiedje (NAS) is University Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics and of Crop and Soil Sciences at Michigan State University and is director of the Center for Microbial Ecology, one of the original NSF-funded Science and Technology Centers. He is a distinguished microbial ecologist with important contributions to denitrification, bioremediation, and molecular ecology. Recently he made notable contributions using genomics and metagenomics to the understanding of ecological functions, speciation, and niche adaptation. He has served as editor in chief of Applied and Environmental Microbiology and editor of Microbial and Molecular Biology Reviews. He served on the NRC Board on Life Sciences, chaired EPA’s Science Advisory Panel, and serves on DOE’s Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee. He was president of the American Society for Microbiology and of the International Society of Microbial Ecology. He shared the 1992 Finley Prize from UNESCO for internationally significant research contributions in microbiology and was recently awarded an Einstein Professorship by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is a fellow of the AAAS, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the Soil Science Society of America.

David Wark is a professor of physics at Imperial College London and a senior laboratory fellow at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He is an internationally renowned authority on neutrino physics, recognized for his work on a series of groundbreaking neutrino experiments, including the SAGE solar neutrino experiment, which first showed that there was a deficit of neutrinos from the proton-proton solar cycle, and, more recently, on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada, where he served as U.K. co-spokesman. Currently, Dr. Wark is one of the principal investigators and international spokesmen for the neutrino oscillation experiment being constructed in Japan. He is a member of the Scientific Policy Committee at CERN and was formerly a member of the CERN SPSC committee, which supervised the CNGS long-baseline neutrino oscillation program, and was a founding member of the European Committee for Coordination of Astroparticle Physics. Dr. Wark was the first chair of the U.K.’s Astroparticle Physics Advisory Panel, a former member of the European Committee for Future Accelerators, was the Chair of the European Physical Society High Energy Particle Physics Division, and has served on the advisory committees for SNOLAB and the CanFranc underground laboratory. He was awarded the Institute of Physics Rutherford Prize in 2004 for contributions to astroparticle physics, is a former President of the Physics Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Institute of Physics.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographies of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. An Assessment of the Science Proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13204.
×
Page 112
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographies of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. An Assessment of the Science Proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13204.
×
Page 113
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographies of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. An Assessment of the Science Proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13204.
×
Page 114
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographies of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. An Assessment of the Science Proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13204.
×
Page 115
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographies of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. An Assessment of the Science Proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13204.
×
Page 116
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographies of Committee Members." National Research Council. 2012. An Assessment of the Science Proposed for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13204.
×
Page 117
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According to the big bang theory, our Universe began in a state of unimaginably high energy and density, contained in a space of subatomic dimensions. At that time, unlike today, the fundamental forces of nature were presumably unified and the particles present were interacting at energies not attainable by present-day accelerators. Underground laboratories provide the conditions to investigate processes involving rare phenomena in matter and to detect the weak effects of highly elusive particles by replicating similar environments to those once harnessed during the earliest states of the Earth. These laboratories now appear to be the gateway to understanding the physics of the grand unification of the forces of nature.

Built to shield extremely sensitive detectors from the noise of their surroundings and the signals associated with cosmic rays, underground facilities have been established during the last 30 years at a number of sites worldwide. To date, the United States' efforts to develop such facilities have been modest and consist primarily of small underground laboratories. However, the U.S. underground community has pushed for larger underground facilities on the scale of major laboratories in other countries. An Assessment of the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) addresses this matter by evaluating the major physics questions and experiments that could be explored with the proposed DUSEL. Measuring the potential impact, this assessment also examines the broader effects of the DUSEL in regards to education and public outreach, and evaluates the need associated with developing U.S. programs similar to science programs in other regions of the world.

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