Dr. James Olsen

Biography

James Olsen is a Professor of Physics and the Department Chair at Princeton University. He received a B.S. in Physics from the University of California, Davis, and a Ph.D. in experimental high-energy physics from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1998. His research interests focus on the fundamental constituents of matter, particularly on quarks and leptons, exploring questions related to the 'flavors' of subatomic particles and how they are organized into separate generations with significant mass splittings. Olsen has played a pivotal role in the search for the eventual observation of Higgs boson decay into bottom quarks, a project utilizing the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. Additionally, he has been involved in research aimed at elucidating the flavor structure of the quark sector and studying CP violation through the use of the BaBar detector at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). He has been recognized as a Sloan Research Fellow and a Kavli Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Research Interests