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Masahiro Morii Named Professor of Physics at Harvard
Cambridge, Mass. - November 30, 2007 - Experimental particle physicist Masahiro Morii, who has conducted research and built key electronics and detectors at international particle physics laboratories including CERN and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, has been appointed professor of physics in Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, effective July 1, 2007.
Morii, 44, was previously John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard, where he has been on the faculty since 2000.
"The most important particle physics opportunity in three decades awaits us with the activation of CERN's Large Hadron Collider; Professor Masahiro has and will continue to play a major role in important discoveries from this collaboration," says Jeremy Bloxham, dean for the physical sciences in FAS. "Among his peers, he is known for his effective leadership, for his skill in designing and building reliable components of such large experiments, and for his strength in choosing topics for analysis and pushing through to obtain results. Here on campus, he is known for his intellectual strength, his fantastic teaching record, and his fine technical abilities."
The author of more than 400 peer-reviewed research papers, Morii has run Harvard's research group on a Stanford Linear Accelerator Center experiment called BABAR, an electron-positron collider intended to study asymmetries in particle physics. These asymmetries between matter and antimatter, known as CP violations, are a crucial area of study in fundamental physics.
Morii was instrumental in building the central tracking chamber for the BABAR experiment, a critical but complex task. He also designed and built a trigger upgrade that allowed the experiment to obtain data at increased beam intensities. With his help, BABAR has succeeded in measuring parameters of the Standard Model of particle physics -- which aims to unify all the universe's forces and particles under a single framework -- and has confirmed that this model makes sense.
Morii joined the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, in 2006. The LHC, slated to come online next year, is a proton-proton collider intended to shed light on additional symmetry violations and to illuminate new physics beyond the Standard Model. Morii has contributed to LHC's detector construction as part of the Boston Muon Consortium. He also worked at CERN as part of the international OPAL collaboration from 1992 to 1996.
Morii holds a B.A. and M.S. in physics from Kyoto University, awarded in 1986 and 1988, respectively, and a Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, awarded in 1994. He was a research associate at Tokyo until 1996, when he joined the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center as a research associate, a post he held until joining Harvard in 2000. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 2002 and 2003, and was nominated for Harvard's Joseph R. Levenson Award for teaching excellence in 2004.
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