From Physics to Pharma

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Published: Tuesday, January 31 2023 00:01

Sylvie Ryckebusch (B.S. ’87, physics; B.S. ’87, mathematics) has never underestimated the value—or the challenges—of earning a physics degree.

“I think physics is the hardest subject really,” she explained. “It trains your problem-solving skills, the way you think and learning to work on difficult things. When you’ve spent years studying physics, I think it trains you well for many other lines of work.”Sylvie Ryckebusch

Ryckebusch applied these skills on a rewarding academic and professional path that took her from the research lab to the business world, and from the U.S. to Europe and beyond. Over the past 20 years, she built an impressive track record leading business development for biotech and pharmaceutical companies, negotiating complex research collaborations and licensing transactions, and specializing in everything from partnerships and corporate strategy to helping bring new therapeutics to market. 

Today, as chief business officer at BioInvent International in Lund, Sweden, Ryckebusch supports the company’s efforts to develop new antibody drugs for the treatment of cancer. And though she didn’t exactly plan it this way, she’s exactly where she wants to be.

“People always ask me, ‘How did you organize your career to end up in business development?’ because that’s a place where a lot of people want to be—in the pharma industry, and most particularly, in business development” she said. “Honestly it was mostly happenstance. One thing led to another and another and I ended up here, although what was important in making these career choices was the self-awareness along the way about what kind of work and environment I enjoyed.”

European roots and a strong work ethic

Growing up in Howard County, Maryland, Ryckebusch always felt a strong connection to her European roots. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. from France before she was born. 

“My mother was a secretary at the World Bank and my father was a chef,” she explained. “He grew up during the war in very difficult times in northern France and had to be pulled out of school early to help support the family, so he became an apprentice in a restaurant. When I was growing up, he was working around the Washington area as a chef and had his own restaurant for a time in Ellicott City.”

With many of her relatives still living in France, Ryckebusch decided to spend her high school years there. Fluent in French, she was interested in many subjects, but her teachers pushed her to pursue her strengths in mathematics.

“If you’re good at science, people aren’t going to tell you that you should study English literature,” Ryckebusch said. “I was always good at math and science and in the schools in France, if you’re good in math they tell you that’s what you’ve got to do, they push you.”

Ryckebusch returned to the U.S. after high school and began college at the University of Maryland in 1983, taking on the challenges of a double degree in mathematics and physics. Raised with a strong work ethic, she was driven to keep doing more. 

“I made it really hard for myself,” she admitted. “I skipped the first-year courses, which I probably shouldn’t have done and I did a double-degree program, which would have been a five-year program, but I did it in four years. So, what I remember most from my UMD time is working really hard.”

In those intense academic years, Ryckebusch spent her summers working with a low-temperature physics group at Bell Labs. After graduating from UMD in 1987, she moved on to a Ph.D. program in computation and neural systems at Caltech. 

“My focus was understanding the control of locomotion by the neural system,” she explained. “I was, on the one side, building integrated circuits, transistors and capacitors, the circuits that modeled certain behaviors of neurons in the brain, and in parallel, I was doing actual experiments to identify neuronal circuits involved in locomotor functions.”

After earning her Ph.D. in 1994, and a postdoctoral fellowship at Brandeis University, Ryckebusch was ready for something new. 

“I had to weigh doing academic science for a career or at least the next six or seven years or starting something different, and I thought, I want a change,” she explained. “I like variety and I wanted to be in the real world, though I wasn’t really sure what the real world was.”

Encouraged by a friend, Ryckebusch joined the Harvard Business School as a postdoctoral researcher. There, she investigated business operations, developing case studies on companies all over the world, some of which are still taught at HBS today.

“I went to Japan, to Israel, all over the place, exploring particular issues related to businesses and the organization of their work and writing these up in case studies,” she recalled. “It was different and it was fun, and I fell into it very easily.”

From case studies to consulting

In 1996, Ryckebusch’s academic background, business research at Harvard and fluency in French helped her land a management consulting position at the Paris office of global consultants McKinsey & Company. The experience helped strengthen her skill set in corporate strategy and business development, but after four years, she realized she missed working with scientists and the intricacies of scientific problem-solving.

“I thought this has been fun and I learned so much, but it was very hard work and not really who I was” Ryckebusch explained. “I wanted to get back into a career closer to science.”

Hoping to apply her experience in both science and business, Ryckebusch joined Serono, a large Geneva, Switzerland-based biotech firm. She quickly realized it was the right place at the right time.

“I ended up in the very best possible place for me and I loved it,” she recalled. “You’re negotiating partnerships and alliances—pharma-pharma, pharma-biotech, biotech-academia alliances—and you have to have a good grasp of the science because you’re working on drug development. It was a business role that I’m still doing today over 20 years later.”

Pharmaceutical giant Merck eventually acquired Serono and shut down its Geneva office, but by then Ryckebusch had three kids in school and didn’t want to uproot her family. So, in 2012, she started her own consulting business. Based in Geneva, she worked with pharma and biotech clients, even finding time to teach a graduate-level pharmaceutical business development course at the Grenoble Ecole de Management.  

Then in early 2020, one of Ryckebusch’s clients, BioInvent, suggested that she join them full time as chief business officer.

“BioInvent is a super company, with very high quality science and promising therapeutic drug candidates. I was doing more and more work with them, and they said, ‘Why don’t you join us,’ and it just made sense,” Ryckebusch recalled. “So that’s what I’m doing now.”

Part of a bigger mission

As BioInvent’s chief business officer, Ryckebusch works remotely from her home in Geneva, leading business development efforts, building partnerships and research collaborations for drug development, as well as supporting the investor-backed company with financing and company strategy.

“It costs $800 or $900 million to develop a pharmaceutical product, so biotechs almost never take them to market on their own, you have to partner with a big pharma at some point,” she explained. “There’s a whole strategy around how you partner, when you partner and with whom.”

Ryckebusch takes pride in her role as part of BioInvent’s scientific work in cancer therapeutics. But she’s quick to note that she’s just one small part of a much bigger mission.

“I enjoy that feeling of collectively bringing something forward—we’re all cogs in a wheel,” she explained. “In the pharma industry, it takes 15 to 20 years to develop a drug and a lot of people like me contribute along the way.”

For Ryckebusch, making that kind of contribution means everything.

“It’s all about finding great drugs and developing them and pushing the frontiers of the science,” she reflected. “I really hope one of BioInvent’s products makes it to the market. I would be proud to be able to say a little bit of that came from me.”

Rehearsals, Recitals and Research

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Published: Tuesday, January 31 2023 00:01

University of Maryland physics and astronomy dual-degree senior Delina Levine got her first introduction to music when she just was six years old, soon after she pestered her parents to sign her up for piano lessons. Delina Levine

As her fingers rhythmically tapped the black and white keys, Levine noticed that the sounds she created with the piano differed depending on the amount of force her hands exerted on the keys. Applying the piano’s pedals while she played created variations in the sounds she produced and while some chords harmonized, others didn’t. It wasn’t until years later that she learned why and how these changes influenced the music she played.

In middle school, her teacher asked the students to write a paper on any topic, so long as that topic tied back to math. Although Levine was skeptical, her teacher assured her that there was a mathematical connection to almost anything she could think of. 

“Of course, I chose to write about music for that assignment,” Levine recalled. “I wasn’t sure at first, but when I researched for the paper, I got to learn about the relationship between math, physics and music. What really struck me was how physics is so involved in music, especially with concepts like acoustics. It was then that I realized how important physics is when it comes to understanding how things work.”

After that assignment, Levine believed physics could be the key to satisfying her natural inquisitiveness about music, stars and outer space. At UMD, Levine’s trifecta of interests prompted her to pursue a dual degree in astronomy and physics in addition to a minor in music performance. 

“My first year here, I attended a class taught by Professor Bhatti that talked about the detection and analysis of dark matter. I remember that the class made a big impression on me,” Levine explained. “That was a big step for me into the overlap between physics and astronomy.”

Levine also participated in the 2020 Student Summer Theoretical Physics Research Session (SSTPRS), a program developed by Distinguished University Professor of Physics S. James Gates Jr. Designed to introduce undergraduates to the world of experimental physics research, SSTPRS provided Levine’s first opportunity to see real-world applications for the science she learned in the classroom. 

“We spent the first few weeks learning the math and physics needed for the calculations we needed to make later in the program,” said Levine. “That summer, I worked on supersymmetry projects with a group of other undergrads like me, and it gave me critical insight into research and all of the collaborative effort behind it.”

According to Levine, UMD’s Society of Physics Students (SPS) has also been one of the most instrumental parts of her journey to becoming a full-fledged researcher. As a member since 2019, Levine participated in exclusive behind-the-scenes lab tours led by professors and industry physicists, professional development workshops and training sessions, field trips to the campus nuclear reactor and movie nights. In her sophomore year, Levine served as SPS board communications officer. By fall 2022, she was elected president—taking a leadership role in the organization that guided her since the beginning of her journey in physics. 

“All the camaraderie and knowledge-sharing that I experienced with SPS inspired me to get more involved with its activities and leadership,” Levine said. “I just wanted to continue that tradition and remind my peers that we’re all in this together.”

"As SPS president, Delina is an inspiring leader,” said Donna Hammer, SPS faculty advisor and director of education for UMD’s Department of Physics. “Her vision for SPS includes providing the opportunity for every physics major to feel included, informed and supported.”

Off-campus, Levine puts the skills she developed at UMD into practice. She currently works as an undergraduate research assistant at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), where she studies gamma-ray bursts. Since she started her remote position with NAOJ in 2021, Levine has already written on gamma rays, their luminosity and their potential to be used as a way to measure cosmological distances. 

“Although my work at NAOJ is done online, the research environment I’m part of is incredibly diverse. My colleagues are from different time zones and countries all over the world—Italy, India, Japan, just to name a few. I also have a female principal investigator, which is still a rare occurrence in the world of physics and astronomy,” Levine said. “I see her as a role model and mentor, and I’d like to become someone like that in the future for other young scientists. What I’ve learned from NAOJ and also UMD makes me feel better equipped to tackle future challenges and goals that may come to me as a researcher."

Despite her busy schedule, Levine continues to make time for music. Over the years, she accompanied choirs and played with jazz bands, which she says helped her explore her talents beyond her classical training and develop additional layers of flexibility. In May 2022, Levine performed a piano recital at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center to an audience full of her peers, something she hopes to do again before she graduates in May 2023. 

“Having these experiences with SPS, my music and my research is very fulfilling for me. I especially appreciate the collaborativeness, creativity and diversity of thought that all these parts of my life encourage,” Levine said. “As president of SPS, I really want to continue supporting my fellow physics students with more opportunities to support and learn from each other—just as SPS and my mentors have done for me.” 

Nathan Schine Twists Photons and Cools Atoms in a Unique Quantum Dance

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Published: Thursday, January 26 2023 00:01

Deepening our understanding of the quantum world and developing new tools to peer into it is a very active area of physics research today. In this crowded field full of diverse theoretical ideas and physical tools, Assistant Professor and JQI Fellow Nathan Schine has managed to carve out a distinctive space for himself and his lab.Nathan Schine

Schine’s research program manipulates the interactions between atoms and photons—the particles that make up light—in novel, well-controlled ways in order to simulate other, harder-to-probe quantum phenomena. To coax the photons into new simulation patterns, Schine is using unique arrangements of mirrors to bounce photons around. He is also strategically placing atoms in the photons’ way with the help of precisely controlled laser beams. To boot, the atoms he is using (ytterbium) have a relatively complex structure, giving Schine extra avenues to explore. He has been able to create this unique niche by combining the experimental expertise he gained from graduate school and postdoctoral research with his theoretical big-picture savvy.

Schine has been slowly homing in on his academic sweet spot for much of his life. Growing up, his interests were broad—they included science and math, but also history and other areas of the humanities. “It wasn't like I knew from an early age that I was going to go be a physicist,” Schine says.

Science wasn’t outside the realm of Schine’s imagination, however. His father was a chemistry teacher, his mother had a degree in math, and his grandfather was a physics professor at Vanderbilt University. 

Keeping his options open, Schine attended Williams College. Ranked first among U.S. liberal arts colleges by U.S. News and World Report, Williams boasts an unusually strong science and math program. Schine was interested in math, but eventually found it to be too abstract for his taste. “When math got into proving the existence of a solution to a problem and not actually solving the problem, I sort of lost the thread a bit,” he recalls. Instead, he found that the part of math he enjoyed most could be gotten through physics, so he dove deeper into the subject. 

An undergraduate research project sealed the deal for Schine as a physicist and experimentalist. He started working in the lab of his soon-to-be quantum mechanics professor, Barclay Jermain Professor of Natural Philosophy at Williams Protik Majumder, midway through his sophomore year.

Under Majumder’s supervision, Schine started to get a taste for experimental physics. He was performing spectroscopic measurements on indium atoms as a sophomore and continued working with Majumder until he graduated. Indium, with its three loosely bound, outermost electrons, is hard to model theoretically, and Majumder’s lab collaborated with theorists to benchmark their calculations and zero in on precise values. 

Schine relished the chance to make a real contribution to the project. He also found joy in tinkering in the lab, finding his calling as an experimentalist. “I liked the day-to-day aspects of it, the actual process of building a laser or something,” Schine says. “A lot of it is very tactile and building up this sort of Rube Goldberg device that happens to be useful for physics—that, I think, is a lot of fun.”

Majumder had a slightly different take on what set Schine apart in his lab. “He was really unusual, even as a 20-year-old, in being able to balance comfortably the very hands-on build stuff with the bigger intellectual picture, which is obviously something that's been characteristic of his career since then,” Majumder says. Schine’s research with Majumder culminated in a senior thesis and a peer-reviewed publication. 

Schine was inspired by his undergraduate research experience and decided to pursue graduate school. His chops setting up lasers and other experimental equipment meant he could hit the ground running and start contributing right away to the brand-new lab of Jonathan Simon at the University of Chicago. 

The lab Simon was envisioning involved filling an optical cavity—a set of mirrors trapping light and bouncing it back and forth between them—with ultracold rubidium atoms. The idea was to use the photons themselves as a quantum playground, used to re-create and study quantum phenomena that happen in other, less accessible settings. 

A lot of the interesting quantum phenomena that appear in real materials are hard to peer into at the quantum level but are nevertheless important for our daily lives because of their ubiquitous applications in technology. In Simon’s lab, precisely controlled photons can play a similar role to electrons inside of a material. Studying how these photons behave in a cavity and measuring them directly can then give clues about what happens inside the chunks of material. 

There is one obvious limitation for photons playing the part of electrons: They don’t have an electric charge. And charged electrons—specifically in magnetic fields—are responsible for a range of interesting material effects that might need simulating. 

Back in the early 1980s, physicists discovered one such effect.  A thin layer of semiconductor placed inside a strong magnetic field was found to conduct electricity in very precise chunks. As the magnetic field is increased, the conductivity doesn’t change for a while—it stays at one plateau—and then hops abruptly to another plateau. This is known as the integer quantum Hall effect (IQHE) because the plateaus appeared at very regularly spaced integer values.

Even more strangely, for very cleanly engineered semiconductors, experimentalists found sub-plateaus within the plateaus, appearing at precise fractions of the previous integer values. They termed this, predictably, the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE). The origins of these fractional plateaus are largely still a mystery, although physicists are pretty certain that it has something to do with interactions between electrons giving rise to unexpected collective behaviors. If there was a way to simulate the full quantum theory of the FQHE, it might reveal new insights into what’s going on. 

Simon and Schine, along with their labmates, hatched a plan. They conceived of a new way to make photons behave as though they have charge and live in a magnetic field that could, in principle, allow the photons to interact with each other and simulate the FQHE. Their plan involved a wonky cavity: four mirrors aligned to bounce light around in a twisted bow-tie configuration over and over again, with one of the mirrors slightly askew, as in the diagram shown below.

Photons and atoms in Schine’s tilted bow-tie cavity. (Credit: Nathan Schine/JQI)

Schine and his labmates focused on what happened along a plane at the center of this cavity. There, the photons were analogous to electrons traveling inside a thin material like in either of the Hall effects. The twisted mirror configuration causes the photons to twist around, much like electrons precess around inside a magnetic field. 

With careful cavity design, they were able to make the analogy come to life and make their photons replicate the IQHE in its full glory. They published this result in the journal Nature. 

To go beyond integer quantum Hall physics, the particles need to interact with one another—not just pass through each other, like photons are wont to do. That’s where atoms entered the picture. Previously, scientists had worked out a technique that allows atoms to serve as an intermediary through which photons can talk to each other. 

In parallel with the twisted cavity work, Simon’s lab had been working on this atom-assisted approach to making photons interact with each other. This involved cooling a gas of rubidium atoms to extremely low temperatures, just a touch above absolute zero. Then, the light was tuned to a particular color that would allow one of the rubidium atoms to absorb a single photon. This atom then prevented any nearby atoms from absorbing a photon, ensuring no other photon got too close. This created an effective interaction between photons, where they were averse to being too close to one another. 

The next step was to combine the two techniques: put the rubidium inside the skewed bowtie cavity. The cavity makes photons act like electrons in a magnetic field, and the atoms create a medium through which the photons can interact. The combination created the right conditions for FQHE physics. Although short-lived, the photons in Schine’s experiment appeared to indeed exhibit the hallmarks of fractional quantum Hall physics. Schine and his labmates published this result in the journal Nature. 

This was the first time the fractional quantum Hall effect had been simulated in any medium. For his graduate work, Schine was named a finalist for a thesis prize from the American Physical Society’s Division of Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics, the most prestigious thesis award in this field. 

Schine was still circling around his ultimate niche, though, and he sought to broaden his experimental skillset during his postdoctoral studies. He joined the group of Adam Kaufman at JILA at the University of Colorado Boulder (sometimes snarkily called JQI West). Kaufman’s lab manipulates atoms with light, using a tool called optical tweezers—laser beams focused down to a very narrow spot, intense enough to hold an atom in place. 

Schine, Kaufman, and collaborators used these optical tweezers to put a new spin on atomic clocks, which are the most precise timekeepers we have. They work by counting the intrinsic ticking of individual atoms. Precise as they are, scientists are actively working on making them even more so, both for better technology like navigation and geolocation and for scientific inquiries, like the basic nature of fundamental constants and gravity. 

The team endeavored to use a fundamentally quantum property—entanglement—to make pairs of atoms tick in tandem, thereby making the clock more precise. They cooled a gas of strontium atoms just above absolute zero and used optical tweezers to create a large array of atom pairs. These pairs were then made to interact using the same trick Schine had used during his graduate work: one atom absorbing a photon prevented another atom nearby from doing so as well, thus making their behavior depend on one another. Generating entangled atoms like this is a promising way to improve clock performance. They published this work in the journal Nature Physics. 

Now, Schine is starting to build up his own lab here at the University of Maryland. When deciding exactly what kind of experiment to embark upon, Schine was guided by his graduate school advisor Simon’s philosophy. “There are different strategies for setting up experiments,” Schine says. “But I think Jon’s was very much to build something that no one else has done before experimentally—to put ourselves in an area where there's a lot of low-hanging fruit.” Schine explained that this will involve combining his optical cavity expertise with an array of tweezer-trapped atoms, now using ytterbium. For instance, he predicts this will allow dramatic improvements in performing quantum measurements, which is an essential part of quantum computing or quantum simulation experiments. 

As Schine is assembling his lab and unique research program, he encourages interested students and postdocs to reach out to him. And, according to Schine’s undergraduate adviser, Schine’s teaching and mentoring abilities promise to be excellent. “One of the things we really work hard at in a place like Williams,” Majumder says, “is to make sure our students are not just the ones who can get into the lab, hide in a corner and just do amazing work. And that really comes through with Nathan. He's just such a good explainer of what he's doing. And he's so enthusiastic—it's very infectious.”

Story by Dina Genkina

Taking the SMART Path

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Published: Thursday, January 26 2023 00:01

In 2021, when Isabelle Brooks left her home in Minnesota to study physics at the University of Maryland, she knew it would mean a big transition—from an all-girls high school with fewer than 500 students to a huge college campus with more than 40,000 students. It turned out to be even more exciting than she expected.

“It was definitely a culture shock,” Brooks recalled. “I told my roommate it was crazy to me that I kept seeing so many faces I didn’t recognize. I was around so many different people doing so many differIsabelle Brooksent things—it was a really cool and exciting experience.”

Brooks’ experiences have exceeded her expectations in more ways than one, and although she’s only a sophomore she’s already charting her path toward a career in physics. One big boost in that direction came last year when she was awarded a Department of Defense SMART (Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation) Scholarship. 

SMART Scholars receive full tuition for up to five years and hands-on internship experience working directly with an experienced mentor at one of over 200 innovative laboratories across the Army, Navy, Air Force and Department of Defense, plus a stipend and full-time employment with the Department of Defense after graduation. 

This summer, Brooks will intern at a U.S. Army facility in Maryland. 

“I’ll be working at Aberdeen Proving Ground with the Department of Defense,” Brooks said. “The lab I’ll be working with focuses on satellite communications and other innovative technologies for our armed forces. It’s super exciting.”

Physics in the family

Always a strong student, Brooks got an early introduction to physics thanks to her father who studied physics when he was in college.

“My dad was my biggest influence,” she explained. “He’s a patent attorney now and he works with a lot of science and technology, which has been super cool to watch as I’ve been growing up.”

Despite her interest in her dad’s work, Brooks wasn’t initially drawn to physics herself.

“My dad was always like, ‘It’s really important to study science,’ but I didn’t really want to,” Brooks recalled. “My freshman year in high school I actually did not do well in my introductory physics class at all, I didn’t like the content and I told my dad, ‘I’m never doing this.’”

All it took was one class to change her mind.

“In my senior year I ended up taking honors physics and I had the best, most supportive most influential professor who helped me understand that I am really good at this and there is an opportunity for me to do much more with it,” she said. “After that, it really made sense to me—I liked seeing how physics is playing out in the real world, and I knew this was something I wanted to do.”

So many possibilities

In the summer after Brooks’ first year at UMD, one of her relatives who works with the Defense Department encouraged her to apply for the SMART Scholarship to help her achieve her dream of a degree in physics. Months later she got the news she was hoping for.

“I was checking my inbox every day and when I saw the email I was shaking because I knew this had to be it,” she recalled. “When I opened the email and got the good news that I’d received the scholarship I just felt so honored. There are just so many possibilities that can come from this.”

Since then, regular check-in meetings with her SMART mentor James Mink, Chief of the Tactical Systems Branch (SATCOM) have helped Brooks learn more about the opportunities ahead and prepare for her summer internships. This summer—and every summer until she graduates—she’ll work directly with her mentor at the U.S. Army DEVCOM C5ISR Center - Aberdeen Proving Ground, gaining valuable hands-on experience and training that will prepare her for a full-time position there after graduation.

Brooks credits her participation in the FIRE (First-Year Innovation and Research Experience) program and her work with the Simulating Particle Detection research group for helping her build a strong foundation for her research, which has also focused on the challenges of quantum Fourier transforms—mathematical models that help to transform the signals between two different domains. 

She’s gained more confidence in herself and her abilities every step of the way.

“My parents always raised me to believe I could do anything I put my mind to, overcome any obstacle, but I think coming to such a big school, at first I wasn’t sure if I could really do this,” she recalled. “But now I just feel like I’ve opened up so much more confidence in myself and an awareness of my ability and my strength as a student, and that feels really good.”

Brooks continues to explore her fascination with physics in exciting and unexpected ways, thanks to professors who challenge and inspire her. Her favorite class this year was PHYS 235: The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

“It’s taught by Professor Sylvester Gates, who I think is the coolest person ever,” Brooks said. “I was so excited when I was in that class, but it was definitely hard. If I wasn’t a physics major, I think I’d be crying with the problem sets we had and the material we worked on, but that class and a lot of my physics classes have pushed me to think in new ways.”

It's been less than two years since Brooks came to UMD from a small Minnesota high school, but now as she pursues her passion for physics and looks ahead to the opportunities that will come with her SMART Scholarship, she’s thinking big.

“I just have this feeling that I can do a lot more with my life and my education than I ever grasped,” she explained. “I think with this Defense Department scholarship I’ll most likely pivot towards applied research and satellite communication technology, and knowing that the work I’ll be doing will actually support people who fight for our country is incredibly amazing. I can’t wait to make a difference.”

Written by Leslie Miller

When Higgs Fly

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Published: Thursday, January 26 2023 00:01

When Christopher Palmer was a physics graduate student at UC San Diego, he had to decide whether to specialize in supersymmetry or search for the Higgs boson.

Though there was no experimental evidence of the Higgs boson’s existence at the time, Palmer was convinced that this elusive elementary particle—believed to be linked to a field that gave mass to everything in the universe—was somewhere out there.Chris Palmer

“The Higgs boson is such a cornerstone of a very well-established theory called electroweak theory,” Palmer said. “It could be a lack of imagination on my part, but I could not imagine the Higgs boson not existing.”

He trusted his gut and dedicated his studies to the Higgs, which set him on course to Switzerland to join one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) beginning in 2010. Luck was on his side, and he ended up being part of the research group that recorded the highest number of Higgs bosons in their analyses, contributing to the particle’s official discovery the following year.

He hasn’t looked back since. In March 2021, Palmer became an assistant professor of physics at the University of Maryland, where he continues to study the Higgs in search of the next big discovery.

‘Deeply weird’ physics

Palmer’s first academic love wasn’t actually physics—it was math.

“I loved math in high school, so I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll do math in college,’ but that was sort of my ‘hobby major’—and I’m glad it was because I ended up not enjoying mathematical proofs that much,” he said with a laugh.

A fascination with what existed “beyond Earth” prompted Palmer to declare a second major in astronomy as an undergraduate student at USC. But it wasn’t until he took an upper-level course in quantum mechanics—and became enamored with its mathematical intricacies—that he developed a deeper appreciation for physics. 

“It was a new way to use many different aspects of math,” Palmer said. “There’s linear algebra and complex numbers. Taking these integrals and mixing all that up in a pot was really fun for me. But there was also some new physics that was deeply weird, and I couldn’t get enough of it.”

Palmer needed only one quantum mechanics course to meet the requirements of an astronomy major but enjoyed it so much that he took two. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and astronomy in 2007, he took a short drive south to UC San Diego to continue his studies—this time as a Ph.D. student in physics.

Right place, right time

Once Palmer decided to search for the Higgs boson, he joined the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC. Palmer teamed up with a group that was looking for evidence of the Higgs boson’s decay into two photons during proton-proton collisions.

This turned out to be a serendipitous assignment. His group ultimately saw an enormous excess of Higgs bosons in their analysis. 

“At the time in 2011, no one else at CMS had actually seen much of anything in their data, and in my analysis there was the biggest excess of Higgs boson particles in any of CMS’ searches,” Palmer said. “The discovery was literally happening at my fingertips.”

Palmer was so focused on the work that he didn’t have time to get excited about the actual discovery of the Higgs boson, which was confirmed and publicized in 2012.

“There was a whole lot of double- and triple-checking everything in early 2012. I wasn’t sleeping all that much,” he said. “I got excited afterward.” 

With one major discovery under his belt, Palmer was hooked on Higgs. After earning his Ph.D. in 2014, he became a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, where he participated in luminosity experiments and studied the Higgs boson’s decay to bottom quarks—the “most elusive decay” anyone had observed up to that point. 

In 2021, Palmer joined UMD with plans to study signatures of the Higgs boson in greater detail and depth, while also having the flexibility to explore other research interests down the line. 

“One of the things that I really love about this department is that there are so many different types of research that are represented by the faculty,” Palmer said. “In 10 years, if I want to do something different, I don’t know any place where it would be easier.”

Continent-spanning research

Palmer continues to participate in LHC experiments, and much of his work can be done without ever leaving campus. He is part of a team that is studying a new CMS detector, called the MIP Timing Detector, that will more precisely measure charged particles. Because the CMS experiment will need to be operational at -30 degrees Celsius, Palmer and his team are building a cold box at UMD to test components of the detector under extreme conditions.

This research is funded by a Department of Energy grant, which also supports the work of Physics Professor Sarah Eno and Associate Professor Alberto Belloni. Though all three faculty members are involved in LHC experiments, Palmer said they each have their own interests and areas of expertise, which keeps things interesting.

“It’s nice to see what other people are doing, and you don’t always get that when you work in a group that has all the same physics interests,” Palmer said. “It’s also good for the students because they really get to see what is going on in vastly different corners of the experiment, which is important in a giant experiment like CMS that has 3,000-some people in it.” 

In addition to his research, Palmer works to make physics a more inclusive field and is currently exploring ways to improve student mentorship and support for students from historically underrepresented groups. He serves on the executive committee of the American Physical Society’s Forum on Diversity & Inclusion, as well as the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences’ Diversity & Inclusion Advisory Council. He is also the director of Pathway to Physics PhD (P3), a UMD fellowship program that offers fully funded physics degrees, with priority given to applicants from historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions.

Eye on the collider

When he’s not busy with campus initiatives or teaching classes, Palmer keeps tabs on the data flowing out of the LHC. A monitor next to his office door displays numbers and charts showing the latest data from LHC experiments, including the luminosity measurements that Palmer specializes in. 

“Most of the time I’m engaged in my classes and meetings and other things that I’m immediately involved with,” Palmer said, “but I’m always keeping an eye on what’s going on at the LHC out of the corner of my eye.”

Palmer’s research—and a touch of luck—brought him face-to-face with some of the biggest discoveries in physics. When the next uncharted phenomenon shows up in an experiment, Palmer doesn’t want to miss it.

Written by Emily Nunez