Kawtar Hafidi

Kawtar Hafidi is a Moroccan-American experimental nuclear physicist and the Associate Laboratory Director for Physical Sciences and Engineering at Argonne National Laboratory. She researches nucleon and nuclear structure using major accelerator facilities, e.g., Jefferson Lab, DESY, and Fermilab. She is also an advocate for diversity and almost became a professional soccer player when she was 16.

Early life and education Raised as a devout Muslim in Morocco's capital, Rabat, Hafidi showed an early curiosity of the theoretical. "When I was little," she says, "I used to tell my dad, 'I want to learn what God is made of. I believe in him, but I don't see him.'" Hafidi was nudged towards a career in science by her father. When she had to decide between science and literature in ninth grade, her father, a middle-class bureaucrat in the Moroccan government, told her: "What will you do with literature? It's not useful to the country. Since you are good at everything, you should do science."

In her interview for CNN Arabia (2017), Hafidi recalls the doctorate holders strike due to lack of jobs in 1995, in which the state responded to their demands by closing graduate schools, forcing Hafidi to travel to France to complete her graduate studies. However, her father didn't have the money to send her to college abroad. Luckily, her grandmother and aunts—the youngest of whom is a physician—came up with the funds, in some cases by selling jewelry. "They would say, 'We cannot let you waste your talent here,' " she says. She continued her studies at University Paris-Sud where she studied the electromagnetic structure of the Deuterium to receive her PhD in 1999.

Career Hafidi first joined Argonne National Laboratory as a postdoc (1999–2002) and moved on to become an assistant physicist (2002–2006) and a physicist (since 2006). As a leading researcher at Argonne National Laboratory, Hafidi has been "asking philosophical questions, addressing technical fields in detector and software development." Expanding on her research interest of understanding the dynamics of subatomic particles (nucleons) and the forces by which they are held together, Hafidi collaborates with a team of scientists to study 3-D distributions of partons (subatomic quarks and gluons) in nucleons and nuclei, by using particle accelerators at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia, Fermilab in Illinois, and DESY in Hamburg Germany. She was elected as a member of Jefferson Lab users group board of directors in 2010.

She briefly left Argonne in 2013 to work for the Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Physics. In 2015, she returned as the Associate Chief Scientist for Laboratory Directed Research and Development at Argonne National Laboratory. and additionally in 2018 as Associate Laboratory Director for Physical Science and Engineering.

Hafidi also leads Argonne's Women in Science and Technology (WIST) program.

Awards

1996: Graduate Research Fellowship, The French Atomic Agency 2012: Pinnacle of Education Award, University of Chicago & Argonne LLC 2014: Diversity Award, Argonne Women in Science and Technology

Major publications