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Shapiro, Marjorie.
Oral history interview with Marjorie Shapiro, 2021 May 10.
In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Marjorie Shapiro, Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley and Faculty Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Shapiro describes the value of this dual affiliation and she surveys the current state of play at the LHC and its work on dark matter research, and what physics beyond the Standard Model might look like. She recounts her upbringing in Brooklyn and her fathers work as a medical physicist, and she explains the opportunities that led to her undergraduate admission at Harvard. Shapiro describes her immediate attraction to experimental particle physics and some of the challenges she faced as a woman. She explains her decision to go to Berkeley for graduate school, where the Lab was a specific draw and where she worked under the direction of Dave Nygren, whose group was working on the Time Projection Chamber. Shapiro describes her postdoctoral appointment back at Harvard to work on the CDF collaboration with Roy Schwitters, who was CDF spokesman at the time. She explains the exciting discoveries at Fermilab, her involvement in B physics, and the friendly competition with DZero. Shapiro explains that her first faculty appointment at Harvard was never something that she assumed would be long term, and the circumstances leading to her appointment at Berkeley. She explains Berkeleys pivot to CERN following the cancellation of the SSC and the trajectory of the ATLAS program to study electroweak symmetry breaking, and she discusses her advisory work on HEPAP. Shapiro narrates the buildup and elation surrounding the discovery of the Higgs and she describes her accomplishments as the first woman to chair the Department of Physics at Berkeley. She discusses her post-Higgs concentration on SUSY and she explains that in addition to pursuing physics beyond the Standard Model and why the LHC data suggests that there remains much to be learned within the Standard Model. At the end of the interview, Shapiro explains why there remains fundamental unanswered questions on CP violation, and she explains why young physicists should pursue their research in the broadest possible way.
American physicist. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, December 1984. Became a member of the Physics Department at the University of California, Berkeley in 1990. Presidential Young Investigator from 1989-94, Fellow of the American Physical Society (from UC Berkeley, Department of Physics: https://physics.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/marjorie-shapiro).
Chamberlain, O. (Owen)
Nygren, David R.
Ramsey, Norman, 1915-2011
Schwitters, Roy F.
Sulak, Lawrence R., 1944-
European Organization for Nuclear Research
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Harvard University.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
University of California, Berkeley
Dark matter (Astronomy)
Electroweak interactions.
Higgs bosons.
Standard model (Nuclear physics)
Women physicists -- United States.
Women in science
Interviews. aat
Oral histories. aat
Transcripts. aat
DZero
Time Projection Chamber
Zierler, David, 1979-, interviewer.
AIP-ICOS
American Institute of Physics. Niels Bohr Library & Archives. One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, USA
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