Piermaria Oddone

Pier Oddone serves as chair of the LIGO Advisory Committee, co-chair of the Working Group on the collaboration between the National Cancer Institute and the Department of Energy, member of the National Ignition Facility Management Advisory Committee and member of the Federal Advisory Committee for the NCI’s Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. He was director of Fermilab from 2005 to 2013 where he led the major transition of the laboratory from a program based on the Tevatron Collider to a broad program on neutrinos, muons, particle astrophysics and the energy frontier at the LHC. He was Deputy Director of LBNL from 1990 through 2005 with responsibility for strategic planning and developing and nurturing new initiatives across the laboratory such as NERSC, the JGI, the scientific exploitation of the ALS and projects at the interface of the physical and biological sciences. He was director of the Physics Division at LBNL from 1988 to 1992, supporting new ideas such as the experiment that led to discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. He led the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) Collaboration at SLAC from 1984 to 1987 and from 1974 through 1987 helped develop the technology of TPCs and had responsibility for coordinating the experimental program at the Positron Electron Project at SLAC. He is best known for the invention of the Asymmetric B Factory, a new collider aimed at studying the violation of CP symmetry. Two large facilities were built on this idea, one in Japan and one at Stanford, the latter as a SLAC-LBNL-LLNL collaboration. The facilities and associated detectors discovered and studied the violation of CP symmetry in b-quark decays proving the Kobayashi-Maskawa theory of CP violation in particle physics. He received the Panofsky Award of the American Physical Society for this invention. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Nacional de Ciencias del Perú. He has received honorary degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Universidad Ricardo Palma in Lima, Perú and Universidad de San Martín in Tarapoto, Perú. He received a BS degree from MIT (1965), a Ph.D from Princeton University (1970) and was a post-doctoral fellow at Caltech (1970-72) before joining LBNL in 1972.