2016: Hitoshi Murayama
Hitoshi Murayama is professor for theoretical Physics at the University of California, Berkeley and since 2007 also director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU).
He was born in Japan in 1964 and studied Physics at the University of Tokyo, where he obtained his PhD in Theoretical Physics in 1991. 1993 he became a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. 1995 he became assistant professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became Professor of Physics in 2000. In 2002 he received the Nishinomiya Yukawa Commemoration Prize in Theoretical Physics and became Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2003. Since 2013 he is also a member the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Furthermore, he was invited to give a speech at the United Nations headquarters in New York about how science unites people and brings peace in October 2014.
His main fields of research are theoretical particle physics and cosmology i.e. he is trying to understand the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces acting between them.
The discovery of Neutrino Oscillations was a recent proof that neutrinos have a small but non-zero mass. However our current standard model of particle physics considers them massless. Hitoshi Murayama is investigating mechanisms on how neutrinos could gain their masses.
Another field of research he is working on is understanding dark energy. He tries to shed light on dark energy studing the percularity of the value of the dark energy density. Namely the energy density today is of the same order of magnitude as the matter density in the Universe. This was never the case before and will never be the case again it is unique to our (cosmological) time. If this happens to be not just by chance but for a certain reason, this might help us to understand the role of dark energy in our Universe.
