Winstein elected to NAS

Bruce Winstein, known for his work in high-energy physics, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Winstein is Professor in Physics and in the Enrico Fermi Institute.

"Not very many people in experimental high-energy physics get elected to the National Academy," said Robert Sachs, Professor Emeritus in Physics. "Because of the huge collaborations, it is often hard to identify the leadership. But Winstein's leadership in conceiving of and carrying out, in a relatively small collaboration, a remarkable series of measurements was exceptional."

Winstein's earliest work was a search for quarks at CERN. For the past 10 years, he has been working at Fermilab to study, with ever-increasing precision, the phenomenon known as CP violation -- the discovery of which netted James Cronin, University Professor in Physics, and his collaborator Val Fitch the Nobel Prize. The search for the origin of CP violation is considered one of the greatest outstanding problems in the physics of fundamental particles and could have profound implications for our understanding of how the universe formed.

The search for the origin of CP violation requires very precise measurements, which are extremely difficult to perform at high-energy accelerators due to the large data rates and the high multiplicity of processes that can mask a signal.

"This kind of precision has become a tremendous challenge for researchers in high-energy physics," said Sachs. "Winstein has really set a new standard for precision in the field."

Winstein received his B.A. in physics and mathematics in 1965 from UCLA and his Ph.D. in physics in 1970 from Caltech. He was a research physicist at the Max Planck Institut fuer Physik und Astrophysik in Munich before coming to the University in 1972 as Senior Research Associate in the Enrico Fermi Institute. He has been Professor since 1983. He has also been a visiting scientist at Fermilab since 1990.