Rate My Professor David Nygren

David Nygren is Presidential Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Arlington. He earned a B.A. in Mathematics and Physics from Whitman College in 1960 and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1967. Nygren has had a distinguished career in experimental particle physics, notably at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1973, where he invented the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) in 1974, a groundbreaking detector technology that has been pivotal in numerous high-energy physics experiments. This innovation revolutionized particle tracking by providing three-dimensional imaging with high precision, enabling discoveries in particle physics and contributing to experiments such as those at PEP, LEP, and RHIC. At the University of Texas at Arlington, his research centers on neutrino physics using ultra-large liquid argon time projection chambers, the search for neutrino mass and the Majorana nature through neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ), and the development of novel photodetectors for particle and astroparticle physics. He serves as co-spokesperson for the NEXT experiment, which employs high-pressure xenon gas TPCs to probe neutrinoless double beta decay.

Nygren's contributions have earned him numerous prestigious awards, including election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2000, the E. O. Lawrence Award in 1985, the W. K. H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics in 1998, the IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award in 2018, the APS Division of Particles and Fields Instrumentation Award in 2015, and fellowship in the National Academy of Inventors in 2015. His work has had profound impact on the field, with over 43,000 citations reflecting the widespread adoption of TPC technology in neutrino observatories like IceCube and future large-scale detectors. Nygren continues to advance detector technologies, influencing the design of next-generation experiments probing fundamental questions in particle physics and cosmology.