A Short Biography

I grew up in Newport News, Virginia and attended the College of William and Mary where I got a B.S. in Physics and Math in 1982. Then I went to work for NASA as an engineer at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA. In '85 I left NASA for full-time graduate study in physics. I studied elementary particle theory at the University of Chicago under the guidance of Prof. Jonathan L. Rosner, and I received a Ph.D. from Chicago in 1991. After Chicago I was a postdoc at the University of California at Davis, as an SSC Fellow in '91-92 and a University of California President's Fellow in '92-93.

In 1993 I joined the faculty at the University of Rochester, as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. In 1996 I received a U.S. Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator and an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award. In 1999 I was awarded the University's Curtis Award for Nontenured Faculty Teaching Excellence. I was promoted to Associate Professor in 1999 and Professor in 2004. In 2005 I was elected feloow of the American Physical Society.

Research

I'm a member of the Rochester High Energy Physics Group. My research in elementary particle theory is concerned with the fundamental particles and their interactions. I'm especially interested in phenomenology: how these interactions are manifest in high energy experiments, how to use experiments to test and explore the theory in detail, and to answer the questions about which we still have, at best, a few clues. For example, what is the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking, or, in less technical language, where does mass come from?

More specifically, my research focuses on the phenomenology of the top quark; QCD (Quantum Chromodynamics - the theory of the strong interactions), Supersymmetry, and other theories beyond the Standard Model.

I am one of the organizers of the LHC Theory Initiative, which you can learn about at http://www.lhc-ti.org.

You can find my publications here.

Teaching