20
Plenary Speakers
APS Plenary, Sponsored by the Division of Particles
and Fields
Tuesday, July 29, 3:30–5 p.m. • Northrop Auditorium
1. Physics at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, the Past, the Present and the Future
Roger Rusack, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota
Roger Rusack has been a member of the faculty of the University of Minnesota since 1993. In his
career he has worked on many of the experiments that have defined the Standard Model of par-
ticle physics, co-authoring more than 300 papers on the internal nature of hadrons and observa-
tions of the Higgs and the tau-neutrino. As a member of the CERN CMS collaboration, he was a
major contributor to the 90-ton crystal detector that was used to measure photons that was one
of the major signatures of the production of the Higgs boson.
2. Explorations in the Cosmic Frontier: Shedding Light on the Dark?
Lucy Fortson, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota
Lucy Fortson is associate head of school and associate professor of physics in the School of
Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. A member of the VERITAS and CTA
very-high-energy gamma-ray astronomy collaborations, Dr. Fortson studies Active Galactic
Nuclei (AGN) using multi-wavelength observations to determine the source of gamma-ray
emission from AGN and the evolution of the AGN host galaxies. Dr. Fortson is also deeply
committed to improving the science literacy of all Americans through her role on the Executive
Committee of the Citizen Science Alliance and the Zooniverse project (
).
With projects such as Galaxy Zoo, the Zooniverse provides opportunities for volunteer citizens
to contribute to discovery research by using their pattern matching skills to perform simple
data analysis tasks and to become more deeply engaged in the science research through social
networking and simple data processing tools. Dr. Fortson was recently the vice president for
research at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago where she held a joint research position at the
University of Chicago. Dr. Fortson graduated with a BA in Physics and Astronomy from Smith
College and received her PhD from UCLA in High Energy Physics. She has served on numer-
ous local and national committees including the National Academy of Sciences Astronomy 2010
Decadel Survey, the Astrophysics Science Subcommittee and the Human Capital Committee
of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC), the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate
Advisory Committee (MPSAC) for the National Science Foundation, and the Education and
Public Outreach Review Committee for the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.
3. The Turn of the Screw: A Chilling Ghost Story of Nature’s Most Unusual Fermion
Dan Cronin-Hennessy, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota
Daniel Cronin-Hennessy is an associate professor of physics at the University of Minnesota. He
previously worked at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider where he studied the production
of W bosons. Later he joined the CLEO collaboration where he improved measurements of
the quark mixing parameters and pursued evidence for CP violation in the B meson sector. In
2004 he joined the faculty at the U of M. He is a 2006 recipient of a Sloan Fellowship. Recently
Professor Hennessy served as co-chair of a national education and outreach study group as part
of the DPF’s long-range planning process. He runs two annual outreach activities, Mastersclass
and QuarkNet, at the University of Minnesota which serves to engage high school students and
teachers in frontier physics research. His current interest includes the study of the phenomena
of neutrino oscillations. He is a member of the NuMI Off-Axis Electron Neutrino Experiment
(NOvA) which has recently started acquiring data.
Roger Rusack
University of Minnsota
Lucy Fortson
University of Minnesota
Dan Cronin-Hennessy
University of Minnesota
