Michael Pennington will be leaving the IPPP in June to take up the position of Associate Director for Theoretical and Computational Physics at the Jefferson Lab, Newport News, Virginia, USA.
Mike received his PhD in theoretical physics in 1971 from Westfield College, University of London. He joined Durham University in 1978, where he is currently a Professor of Mathematical Sciences & Physics. He has held many leadership positions at the university, including serving as head of the Department of Physics from 1999-2003, chair of the Physics Teaching & Learning Committee from 1999-2001 and chair of the University IT Strategy Working Group from 2007-2008. He has been Dean for Educational Outreach since 2008.
Mike’s research focus is in the theoretical and phenomenological study of the strong nuclear force, and he has more than 185 publications to his credit.
In his outstanding career, Mike also has served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Adelaide from 1998-1999 and as a visiting scientist and Fulbright Scholar in the High Energy Theory Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY. He also has been a fellow in the Theory Division at CERN, a research associate at Rutherford Laboratory in England and a physicist in the High Energy Theory Group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, CA. He has served a variety of international science groups, including participation as a member of the CERN SPS Committee and as a member of the DAPHNE Physics Working Group in Frascati, Italy.
Since 2007, Mike also has served as a member of Jefferson Lab’s Program Advisory Committee that reviews and selects experiments to be conducted at the laboratory.
I have been an admirer of Jefferson Lab for some time, and it is a great honor for me to have been selected as the laboratory’s next director of theory, Pennington said. It’s an especially exciting time to join the lab as it constructs its 12 GeV Upgrade and prepares for a future of potentially groundbreaking research.
Jefferson Lab is a world-leading nuclear physics research laboratory devoted to the study of the building blocks of matter – quarks and gluons – that make up 99 percent of the mass of our everyday world. It is one of 17 Department of Energy national research laboratories and facilities. The laboratory is managed and operated by Jefferson Science Associates, LLC, for the DOE’s Office of Science.
