Or Hen

Or Hen is an experimental nuclear physicist and associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He serves as Associate Director for Research and Development of MIT's Laboratory for Nuclear Science and was a co-founder of the ePIC collaboration, which is developing the first detector for the United States Electron–Ion Collider. In 2024, a Physical Review Letters publication on modified quark–gluon distributions in nuclei that he co-authored was named one of Physics World "Top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year".

Early life and education Hen grew up in the moshav Even Sapir, near Jerusalem, where his family worked as farmers raising chickens. He was diagnosed with dysgraphia as a child and struggled in school until an assessment allowed him to take exams orally. During his last two years of high school he took part in an outreach program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, enrolling in university programming courses. He serves as Associate Director for Research and Development of MIT's Laboratory for Nuclear Science. Further measurements probed the repulsive core of the strong nuclear force at short distances, and examined implications of SRCs for low-energy nuclear structure, high-density nuclear matter, and high-energy quark distributions. which was used to determine the free neutron structure function and thereby constrain SU(6) symmetry-breaking mechanisms in QCD.

In 2024, a Physical Review Letters article co-authored by Hen reported evidence for universally modified quark–gluon distributions associated with correlated nucleon pairs. The result was recognized by Physics World as one of the top ten physics breakthroughs of 2024. Hen co-led, together with Tanja Horn and John Lajoie, the EIC Comprehensive Chromodynamics Experiment (ECCE) consortium, which produced the reference design selected for the first EIC detector.

Neutrino interactions Hen has contributed to measurements of lepton–nucleus interactions relevant to precision neutrino oscillation experiments, co-founding the "electrons-for-neutrinos" effort, which uses electron-scattering data to benchmark models of neutrino–nucleus interactions.

Honours and awards Fellow of the American Physical Society (2022) APS Stuart J. Freedman Award in Experimental Nuclear Physics (2019) IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Nuclear Physics (2019) Jefferson Science Associates Thesis Prize (2016)

Selected publications