Piermaria J. Oddone (Fermilab)
Watch the talk (running time approx. 4 min.)
Fermilab Director Pier Oddone was born in Peru and speaks fluent Spanish and Italian. He
graduated from MIT and received a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton
University. Following a post-doctoral fellowship at Cal Tech, Oddone
moved to Berkeley, where he worked on experiments at Fermilab,
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center. Oddone was director of the Physics Division at Berkeley Lab from
1987-91 and served as deputy director of LBNL for fifteen years. He
became Director of Fermilab on July 1, 2005.
Dr. Oddone invented the Asymmetric B Factory, a new kind of elementary
particle collider to study the differences between matter and antimatter.
He worked in the development of the PEP II Asymmetric B-Factory at SLAC (a
second one was built in Tsukuba, Japan) and the formation of the large
international collaboration, BaBar, to exploit its physics opportunities.
Together with the Belle detector in Japan, BaBar discovered the violation of
matter-antimatter symmetry in the decay of particles containing the b quark.
For his role in conceiving the asymmetric B factory, Oddone was awarded
the 2005 W. K. H. Panofsky Prize in experimental particle physics by the
American Physical Society.
Oddone's past community service includes the Stanford Linear Accelerator Policy
Committee, the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) and the KEK
Experimental Advisory Committee in Japan. He is a Fellow of the American
Physical Society. With his wife Barbara, he is proprietor of the Oddone
Vineyard in California's Dry Creek Valley.
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