JONATHAN L. FENG



Overview


Jonathan Feng, photographed by Jessica Wynne

Jonathan Feng works at the interface of particle physics and cosmology with the goal of exploring the deep connections between our understanding of the Universe at the smallest and largest length scales.

In recent years, the fields of cosmology and particle physics have become increasingly interconnected. The workhorse tools of particle physics, giant colliders, like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, now recreate particle collisions at energies that existed just fractions of a second after the Big Bang, providing a window on the early Universe. At the same time, the most powerful telescopes have weighed the Universe and determined that the known particles make up only 5% of its mass, providing overwhelming evidence for particles that have not yet been discovered. Feng has contributed to these developments through wide-ranging work on new particles and forces, dark matter, collider physics, cosmic rays, supersymmetry, and extra dimensions.

Feng holds degrees in physics and mathematics from Harvard, Cambridge, and Stanford. He joined the UC Irvine faculty in 2002 and was appointed Professor and Chancellor's Fellow in 2006, Chancellor's Professor in 2020, and Distinguished Professor in 2021. He is the founding Co-Spokesperson of FASER, the Forward Search Experiment, an experiment looking for high-energy neutrinos and dark sector particles at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Feng's work has been recognized by an NSF CAREER Award, UCI's Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research, the Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the International Association of Chinese Physicists and Astronomers, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, AAAS Fellowship, and Simons Fellow, Simons Investigator, and Heising-Simons Foundation Awards.

Feng is a frequent speaker at conferences and institutions around the world. He has been a member and officer of the Aspen Center for Physics, co-chair of the Advisory Board of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, a member of the International Advisory Board of the T. D. Lee Institute in Shanghai, China, and editor-in-chief and editor of the journals Open Physics, Nuclear Physics B, and Physics Reports. He has served in advisory roles for the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and NASA, as well as for national science funding agencies abroad, including those of Austria, Canada, Hong Kong, Israel, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.

At UC Irvine, Feng has mentored many undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows who have done award-winning research under his supervision, and he served as President of Phi Beta Kappa at UC Irvine. Feng also co-founded ``What Matters to Me and Why,'' a speaker series in which faculty and staff members share their personal stories and most meaningful commitments and beliefs, with the goal of bridging the divide between students, faculty, and staff and helping to foster an atmosphere of community on campus.

Feng's research and interviews have been featured in Science, Nature, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Geographic, New Scientist, Sky and Telescope, Popular Science, and The Big Bang Theory. He co-authored "Dark Worlds," a cover story for Scientific American, which was recognized by a 2011 National Magazine Award, the preeminent award for magazine journalism in the United States. In collaboration with artist Jorge Cham and fellow physicist Daniel Whiteson, Feng created animated comic strips that bring to life the latest hot topics in physics. These videos appeared on PBS television and are freely available on the web, where they have been viewed almost 1,000,000 times. He helped develop UC Irvine's QuarkNet, a program designed to bring the excitement of frontier research to local high school physics teachers and their students, and currently serves on the Advisory Board of Symmetry Magazine.

For more on Jonathan Feng's research, described for a general audience, see the following links:

Press articles about Feng's research and related fields may be found here. For introductions to particle physics for the lay reader, try Particle Adventure, an award-winning, interactive tour of the particle world, and Discovering the Quantum Universe, a colorful, 44-page document produced by the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel.

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October 2022