Meet the Speakers of the Symposium on Albert Einstein and his Legacy

After Banquet Speaker: John Stachel (Friday 8 PM)
John Stachel is Professor of Physics Emeritus and Director of the Center for Einstein Studies at Boston University. His area of research involves scientific, historical and philosophical studies of special and general relativity and quantum theory.  Prof. Stachel has made numerous seminal contributions to the field of relativity. He was the founding editor of "The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein" and is co-editor the the series "Einstein Studies" issued by the Center for Einstein Studies. He founded the series of International Conferences on the History of General Relativity, the seventh of which was held this year. He is author of a collection of articles entitled "Einstein from 'B' to 'Z'," and in 2005 the second edition of the book he edited "Einstein's Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics" was issued, with a new introduction.

 

Symposium Speakers
Arthur Zajonc (Friday 1:30 PM)  Arthur Zajonc is Professor of Physics at Amherst College.  His research includes studies of parity violation in atoms, experiments on the foundations of quantum physics,  and the relationships between the sciences and the humanities. He has coauthored "The Quantum Challenge: Modern Research on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics,"  "Homage to Pythagoras" and more recently, "The New Physics and Cosmology Dialogues with the Dalai Lama." He has edited "Goethe's Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature," and written "Catching the Light: The The Entwined History of Light and Mind."
 

Stephan Friedrich (Friday 2:10 PM) Stephan Friedrich is the Technical Leader of the Advanced Detector Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  He holds degrees in physics and applied physics, and specializes in new particle and radiation detectors and their applications. He has worked on the development of  superconducting tunnel junction imaging detectors and their applications in  astronomy, material science and biophysics.  His research group is developing and improving the performance of high-resolution X-ray, Gamma-ray and neutron detectors, using both superconducting transition edge microcalorimeters and tunnel junctions.  His current research interests are enhancing the sensitivity of cryogenic spectrometers and their scientific use in biophysics, material science, astronomy and national security applications.

 
Robert Boyd (Friday 3:15 PM)  Robert Boyd is Professor of Optics and Physics at the University of Rochester. He is a leading researcher in the fields of optical physics, nonlinear optics and quantum optics. He has published seminal papers on many problems in optics. He is author of several optics texts: "Radiometry and the Detection of Optical Radiation," "Nonlinear Optics," and co-editor of "Optical Instabilities" and "Contemporary Nonlinear Optics." More recently he has been interested in quantum and nonlinear imaging.

William Wootters (Friday 3:55 PM)  William Wootters is the Barclay Jermain Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics at Williams College. His main area of research is quantum information theory. He is author or co-author of numerous scientific papers, including seminal contributions to the field such as the no-cloning theorem and the first landmark article on quantum teleportation. Recently he has been devoting his efforts to the study of the fundamentals of quantum entanglement between two or more quantum objects.
 
Neil Ashby (Saturday 9:00 AM)  Neil Ashby is Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Colorado and a Staff Scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at Boulder. Prof. Ashby has had a distinguished career in theoretical studies of general relativity and its practical applications. He has written extensively on the role of relativity in celestial navigation. His applied-relativity projects include the study of relativistic effects in the network of satellites that form the Global Positioning System and relativity corrections to the trajectories of planets and orbiting satellites. Prof. Ashby currently works at NIST on applications of relativity to clocks, the use of atomic clocks for advanced navigation concepts, and for testing relativity. He is also a "Mentor" to about 30 graduate students and post-docs who work at NIST but who are from University of Colorado.

Rachel Bean (Saturday 9:40 AM)  Rachel Bean is Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University. Her research focuses on big questions facing cosmology today, such as the nature of dark energy, the distribution of matter in the universe, and the constraints that can be placed on cosmological theories. She tackles these problems by analyzing data on the cosmic microwave background and the large-scale structure of galaxies and clusters of galaxies in the universe.
Peter Saulson (Saturday 11:00 AM)  Peter Saulson is a Professor of Physics at Syracuse University. Since 1981 he has worked on gravitational wave detection, as part of the team that has built the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). He has carried out research on the role of Brownian motion as a noise source in interferometers, and wrote the only textbook on gravity wave interferometers. At present, he serves as the Spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

Shane Larson (Saturday 11:40 AM)  Shane Larson is a Research Scientist at the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics at Penn State University. He is involved in current efforts to detect gravitational waves from space-borne satellites. He is member of a research group associated to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) project, a space mission to install a gravitational wave interferometer in space.
Nicholas Bigelow (Saturday 1:45 PM)  Nicholas Bigelow is  Professor of Physics and Optics at the University of Rochester. He has done extensive research in atomic and optical physics. In particular, he has done numerous studies on cooling and trapping of  atoms with light and on the physics of atomic collisions at ultra-low temperatures. More recently he is studying Bose-Einstein condensates and their applications to quantum information, atom lasers, and atom-atom interactions.

Dean Astumian (Saturday 2:25 PM)  Dean Astumian is Professor of Physics at the University of Maine. His research is interdisciplinary, encompassing the fields of condensed-matter physics, biology and chemistry. Recent research involves the study of Brownian motion and on how molecular and biological systems manage to use energy to generate motion.

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