Barbara Jacak

Barbara Jacak is a nuclear physicist who uses heavy ion collisions for fundamental studies of hot, dense nuclear matter. She is director of the Nuclear Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. Before going to Berkeley, she was a member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University, where she held the rank of distinguished professor. She is a leading member of the collaboration that built and operates the PHENIX detector, one of the large detectors that operated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and was involved in the discovery of the quark gluon plasma and its strongly coupled, liquid-like behavior. Throughout her career she has served on many advisory committees and boards, including the National Research Council Committee on Nuclear Physics, and the Physical Review C editorial board.

PHENIX Collaboration Jacak has been a member of the PHENIX Collaboration since the detector was first proposed. She served on the Detector Council from 1992 to 1994 and the Executive Council from 1994 to 2006. She oversaw the successful installation of three major detector upgrades, as well as several smaller upgrades.

ALICE Collaboration Prof. Jacak has been a member of the ALICE Collaboration since March 2015. She is the team leader of the UC Berkeley group.

Honors J. R. Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1984 to 1987 1997 – Fellow of the American Physical Society 2008 – Stony Brook University Distinguished Professor in 2008 2009 – Elected to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences 2019 – Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics