Wendell T. Hill

Wendell Talbot Hill III (born 1952) is an American physicist and professor at the University of Maryland. His research career has largely focused on the intersection of laser physics and quantum science. Early life and education Wendell Hill was born in 1952 in Berkeley, California. His father, Wendell Hill, Jr., was the Chief Pharmacist at in the Orange County Medical Center (now the University of California Irvine Medical Center) in the 1960s, and later served as dean of Howard University’s College of Pharmacy in the 1990s. His mother, Marcella Washington Hill, was a mathematics teacher who taught at the University of the District of Columbia.

Hill attended and graduated from Villa Park High School in Orange, California, in 1970. For his undergraduate studies, he attended the University of California, Irvine, where he received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1974. In 1976, he received his master's degree in physics from Stanford University, and in 1980, he earned a PhD in physics from Stanford University. At Stanford, he was an IBM pre-doctoral fellow (1974-1975) His thesis advisor was Arthur L. Schawlow, and Theodor W. Hänsch and Richard Zare were also on his thesis advisory committee. Hill was also a member of the Schawlow/Hänsch research group while at Stanford. He subsequently joined the faculty at the Institute for Physical Science and Technology (IPST) at the University of Maryland. He began as a research assistant scientist, before being promoted to assistant professor and later associate professor. the Instituto Venezalano de Investigaciones, the Université de Paris, Orsay, as Guest Scientist at the NIST, and at JILA at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

As of 2022, he is also director of the graduate Chemical Physics Program at the University of Maryland.

Personal life Hill married his wife, Patricia Hill, while at Stanford University, and they have three children.