Dr. Barbara Jacak

Biography

Barbara Jacak is a distinguished professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior scientist at the Berkeley Lab. She has a prominent role in the nuclear physics community in the United States, having been appointed director of the Nuclear Science Division at Berkeley Lab. Jacak completed her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley and earned her PhD from Michigan State University under the guidance of advisor David K. Scott. After receiving the Oppenheimer Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory, she became a member of the faculty at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, in January 1997, where she was promoted to Distinguished Professor in 2008. Her research is primarily focused on the experimental study of quark-gluon plasma, which is produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at temperatures reaching trillions of degrees. This research involves significant work at major facilities including the Brookhaven National Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and CERN. Jacak is a founding member of the PHENIX experiment at RHIC and served as its spokesperson from 2007 to 2012. She has been actively involved in the development of the national nuclear physics program and has contributed to various long-range planning working groups. Jacak is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Research Interests