Michael Ramsey-Musolf

1989-2000

As a post-doc in the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT (1989-1992), I worked closely with T. William “Bill” Donnelly on studies relevant to the interpretation of parity-violating electron scattering, ultimately coauthoring an influential review paper, published in Physics Reports, entitled “Intermediate-energy semi-leptonic probes of the hadronic neutral current,” along with Donnelly, John Dubach, Steven Pollock, and Stanley Kowalski. I also benefitted from collaborations with Xiangdong Ji, Matthias Burkardt, and John W. Negele, as well as interactions with Robert Jaffe and various members of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science and staff at the MIT-Bates Laboratory.

I landed my first faculty position as an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia and Staff Scientist at the Jefferson Laboratory in Newport News, Virginia, where I received the prestigious National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. My research at that time focused on applications of chiral perturbation theory to nucleon structure and hadronic parity violation. I subsequently moved to the Institute for Nuclear Theory (INT) at the University of Washington, where I was a Junior Fellow, and then to the University of Connecticut (UConn), as an Associate Professor. I was selected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society  in 2000. My research at the INT and UConn focused on nucleon electroweak form factors and hadronic parity violation, using tools such as chiral perturbation theory and dispersion theory to delineate the contributions from strange quarks.

2001-2012

In 2001, I began an appointment as a Senior Research Associate at the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory at Caltech, where I worked closely with experimentalists Robert McKeown and Bradley Filippone, as well as theorists Mark B. Wise, Petr Vogel, and Marc Kamionkowski. During that period, my research included seminal studies relevant to parity-violating electron scattering and low-energy charged current interactions; development of effective field theories for neutrinoless double beta decay and hadronic parity violation; effective field theory treatments of magnetic moments of neutrinos and the muon; transport theory for electroweak baryogenesis and implications for electric dipole moment searches; and the collider phenomenology of extended Higgs sectors and their implications for an electroweak phase transition.

I moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007, beginning an appointment as a Professor of Physics. My research concentrated on Higgs sector extensions, including their implications for an electroweak phase transition and dark matter and their collider phenomenology; CP-violation and quantum transport for electroweak baryogenesis; and the theoretical interpretation of low-energy Standard Model tests. I was selected as a Vilas Associate in 2009.

2013-today

In 2013, I moved to the University of Massachusetts Amherst as a Professor of Physics and the founding Director of the Amherst Center for Fundamental Interactions (ACFI). To date, the ACFI has hosted over 25 targeted, topical workshops and topical schools in subjects at the interface of elementary particle and nuclear physics with cosmology and astrophysics.  In 2007 and again in 2015, I played a leading role in the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee Long Range Planning process, helping to establish research in fundamental symmetries and neutrinos as a cornerstone of the U.S. nuclear science program.

In the fall of 2019, I began an appointment as a T.D. Lee Chair Professor at the T.D. Lee Institute/Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I have built a world-leading research program in early universe quantum field theory. At present, I retain appointments at both U. Mass and the TDLI/SJTU, facilitating grassroots scientific collaboration and cooperation between the physics communities in the West and China. This effort follows the spirit of both my Ph.D. advisor Sam Treiman and T.D. Lee, who collaborated on the CUSPEA program in the 1980s, while I was a Princeton Ph.D. student.

From my days as a Princeton Ph.D. student to the present, my scientific career has been intextricably interwined with the Chinese scientific community. My interactions with many Chinese collaborators, Chinese post-docs and students under my supervision, and other Chinese scientific colleagues have enriched my scientific life in numerous ways. It is a privilege to honor these relationships by continuing to build bridges between the Western and Chinese physics communities.

In 2023, I was awarded the Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from the American Physical Society. The citation reads:

“For seminal contributions in precision electroweak studies of nuclear and hadronic systems, making fundamental symmetry experiments powerful probes of strong interactions and new physics.”