Barbara Jacek

Jacak’s research focuses on experimental study of quark gluon plasma. This formed in relativistic heavy ion collisions, where nuclei are heated to trillions of degrees and quarks are no longer confined inside hadrons. She is using fast quark and gluon probes of the plasma, following the fate of energy they lose as they traverse the plasma, in experiments at both CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and Brookhaven Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

Jacak received her B.S at UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. at Michigan State University, where she did one of the first experiments at the K-500 Superconducting Cyclotron. Her research career includes 12 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Physics Division, where she was a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow and scientific staff member. After that she spent 18 years as a Professor of Physics at Stony Brook University on Long Island in New York, including 6 years as Spokesperson of the PHENIX Collaboration at RHIC. She moved to Berkeley in 2015 and serves both as Professor of Physics and Director of the Nuclear Science Division at LBNL.

Jacak is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and serves as chair of the Academy’s Board on Physics and Astronomy.

After an international search, Barbara Jacak of the State University New York, Stony Brook, has been named as Berkeley Lab’s new director of the Nuclear Science Division. Jacak has also accepted a joint appointment as Faculty Senior Scientist at Berkeley Lab and Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley.

Jacak is one the leaders of the nuclear physics community in the United States. She did her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley, and her PhD at Michigan State University where her advisor was David K. Scott. On graduating from MSU, she received an Oppenheimer Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory and remained on the staff there until January 1997 when she joined the faculty at SUNY, Stony Brook as Professor of Physics. She was promoted to Distinguished Professor in 2008.

Her research focuses on experimental study of quark gluon plasma; this plasma is formed in relativistic heavy ion collisions where nuclei are heated to trillions of degrees and quarks are no longer confined in hadrons. The experiments are done at Brookhaven National Lab’s RHIC and at CERN.

Jacak was one of the founding members of the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), and was spokesperson of the experiment from 2007 until 2012. Before joining PHENIX, she was active in the CERN heavy ion program as a member of the Helios and E844 Collaborations. She has been very active in the development of the national nuclear physics program and served on the Long Range Plan working groups in 1995, 2001 and 2006. She is a Fellow of the APS and the AAAS, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

IMPORTANT DATES

1984

Obtained PhD in Chemistry, Michigan State University.

2008 – 2014

Distinguished Professor, State University of New York, Stony Brook, Stony Brook (N.Y.).

2009

Member, National Academy of Sciences.

2015 – present

Senior Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

2015 – present

Professor of Physics, University of California, Berkeley.

GRADUATE EDUCATION

East Lansing (Mich.)

EMPLOYMENT

Stony Brook (N.Y.)