Peter H. Fisher

Peter H. Fisher (born 1959) is an American experimental particle physicist, as well as the Thomas A. Frank Professor of Physics and the former head of the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Early life and education Peter Fisher was born in 1959 in San Francisco, California.

He earned a B.S. in engineering physics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983, and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1988. His dissertation, A search for double beta decay in 76Ge, was supervised by Felix H. Boehm.

Career From 1989 to 1994, Fisher was on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. He joined the M.I.T. faculty in 1989, and became a full professor in 2001.

Fisher's research has included twelve years at CERN working on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer for the International Space Station. His research interests also include the detection of dark matter, development of new particle detectors, compact energy supplies, and wireless energy transmission. He released his first book What is Dark Matter? in 2022, synthesizing his own and peers' research into the topic.

He was chair of the MIT Department of Physics from 2014 to 2022. He became the first Head of the MIT Office of Research Computing and Data (ORCD) in 2022. He is a member of JASON (advisory group).

Awards Fisher became a Fellow of the American Physical Society, nominated by the Division of Particles and Fields in 2006, and cited, For initiating Tau Polarization Asymmetry Measurements and W-Boson self couplings, leading to a top mass prediction (found later at FNAL). First proof of single W-production in e+ e- annihilation. Determination of sin20w with proposal to expand to highest accuracy of 10-5 at LHC.