The 2,506th Meeting of the Society

December 6, 2024 at 8:00 PM

Powell Auditorium at the Cosmos Club

The Science Driving Particle Physics and Big Accelerators

JoAnne Hewett

Director, Brookhaven National Laboratory

Sponsored by PSW Science Members Erica & Bruce Kane

About the Lecture

Particle physics explores the smallest constituents of matter and energy, revealing the profound connections underlying everything we see in our vast and complex universe.

Past successes in particle physics have revolutionized our understanding of the universe and prompted a new set of questions. Collectively, these questions have spurred the construction of state-of-the-art facilities, from particle accelerators to telescopes, that will illuminate the connections between the very small and the very large. Major advances in accelerator design and technology are central to realizing some of the most ambitious scientific goals. Now, more than ever, particle physics is a global endeavor. The full breadth of the field’s most urgent scientific questions can be best addressed when world-class facilities are located around the globe, in partnership between nations. This lecture will describe the decadal vision laid out in the recent national strategic plan for particle physics, how it dovetails with global endeavors, and how it places the nation on the threshold of a new era of insight and discovery.

About the Speaker

JoAnne Hewett is director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL/BSA) and president of Brookhaven Science Associates (the Stony Brook University – Battelle that manages the Lab for DOE’s Office of Science), and she is Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook. She is also the chairperson of DOE and NSF’s High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) and Ex Officio member of the 2023 Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (2023p5). Before joining Brookhaven, she was Associate Lab Director for Fundamental Physics and Chief Research Officer at SLAC and Professor of Particle Physics at SLAC and Stanford.

As Director of BNL/BSA, JoAnne oversees a team of more than 2,800 scientists, engineers, technicians, and professionals working to address challenges in nuclear and high energy physics, clean energy and climate science, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, photon sciences, isotope production, accelerator science and technology, and national security.

JoAnne’s research is on the fundamental nature of space, matter, and energy. Some of her best known work is in theoretical physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics and how to design experiments to explore its predictions.

Among other honors and awards, JoAnne is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society, and she served as chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles & Fields.

She earned a BS in Physics and Mathematics at Iowa State, an MS in Physics at UC Irvine, and a PhD in Physics at Iowa State.