| 1 | Name: | Dr. Wick C. Haxton | |
| Institution: | University of California, Berkeley; University of Washington | ||
| Year Elected: | 2024 | ||
| Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 106. Physics | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1949 | ||
Wick Haxton is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he currently directs a National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center on multi-messenger astrophysics. He is also Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Senior Visiting Scientist, RIKEN. Previously he served for 15 years as the first director of the Institute for Nuclear Theory, University of Washington, the Department of Energy’s national center for the field. In that role he established what is now known as the Bahcall Committee, whose recommendations led to the creation of a US facility for deep underground science in South Dakota. Born in Santa Cruz, CA, he received his BA degree in Mathematics and Physics from UC Santa Cruz in 1971, and his PhD in Physics from Stanford University in 1976. After a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Mainz, he became a J. R. Oppenheimer Fellow and then a staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He then spent 25 years at the University of Washington as Professor of Physics and Adjunct Professor of Astronomy, before moving to Berkeley in 2009. He served as chair of Berkeley’s Physics Department from 2017 to 2020. His research contributions focus on low-energy tests of fundamental symmetries and on neutrino astrophysics. His work has impacted multiple subfields of physics, including nuclear and particle physics, astrophysics, atomic physics, and condensed matter. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the Washington State Academy of Sciences. He is a former Guggenheim, Senior Humboldt Foundation, and Simons Foundation Fellow, and in 2004 was awarded the American Physical Society’s Hans Bethe Prize. He and his wife, Laura Kathleen, have two grown children and two grandchildren. | |||