Rate My Professor Sergei Gleyzer

Sergei Gleyzer is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Alabama. He earned his Ph.D. in High-Energy Physics from Florida State University in 2011 with a thesis on searching for dark matter signatures in lepton jet final states, an M.S. in High-Energy Physics from the same university in 2006, and a B.S. in Physics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004. His career trajectory includes research assistant at Florida State University (2006-2011), research fellow at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany (2012-2015), distinguished research fellow at the University of Florida (2015-2019), and faculty positions at The University of Alabama starting as assistant professor in 2019, advancing to associate professor. He currently serves as chief science officer for the Alabama High Performance Computing and Data Center since 2025, interim executive director of the Alabama Cyber Institute in 2025, and co-director of the Alabama Center for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence since 2024.

Gleyzer's research specializes in experimental particle physics at the CERN Large Hadron Collider using the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, contributing to the 2012 Higgs boson discovery and subsequent precision measurements of its properties to detect physics beyond the Standard Model. His group pioneers machine learning applications for rare Higgs boson decays into photons, electrons, and taus, dark matter identification in LHC collisions, and novel techniques using strong gravitational lensing. He advances detector technologies like the High-Granularity Calorimeter for the High Luminosity LHC. Selected publications include "Search for Exotic Higgs Boson Decays H to AA to 4γ with Events Containing Two Merged Diphotons in Proton-Proton Collisions at √s=13 TeV" (Physical Review Letters, 2023), "Reconstruction of Decays of Merged Photons using End-to-End Deep Learning with Domain Continuation in the CMS Detector" (Physical Review D, 2023), "DiffLense: A Conditional Diffusion Model for Super-Resolution of Gravitational Lensing Data" (Machine Learning: Science and Technology, 2024), "Evidence of Higgs Boson Decays to a Pair of Muons" (Journal of High Energy Physics, 2021), and CMS observations of Higgs decays to bottom quarks (Physical Review Letters, 2018). Gleyzer founded the Inter-experimental LHC Machine Learning Working Group, served as founding convener of the CMS Machine Learning Forum, and established the Machine Learning for Science Foundation. His honors include election as an American Physical Society Fellow (2024), Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2025), University of Alabama President's Faculty Research Award (2025), Fermilab LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher Fellowship (2025), and principal investigator on multiple DOE and NSF grants.