Young-Kee Kim, Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago and Interim Director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, is an experimental particle physicist whose research focuses on understanding the origin of mass for fundamental particles. She is currently Past President of the American Physical Society having served as President in 2024.
Before joining the University of Chicago in 2003, where she was chair of the Department of Physics from 2016 to 2022, she was a professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. During her tenure at the University of Chicago, she served as Deputy Director at Fermi Accelerator National Laboratory (2006-2013) and as President of the Korean-American Science and Engineering Association (2022-2023).
She received her B.S. and M.S. in Physics from Korea University, South Korea, and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Rochester. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Sloan Foundation, as well as the recipient of the Ho-Am Prize and the Arthur L. Kelly Faculty Prize.
She has served on numerous international advisory committees and boards, and currently serves on the board of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
In January 2025, Dr. Kim was named interim director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Bonnie Fleming is an internationally recognized particle physicist and a world leader in neutrino physics, she leads all areas of science and technology at Fermilab.
Fleming began her career as a Ph.D student from Columbia University doing research on the NuTeV experiment at Fermilab. Fleming then worked as a Fermilab Lederman Fellow on MiniBooNE. From 2004 to 2021, Flemingwas on faculty in the physics department at Yale University. Fleming served as the Deputy Chief Research Officer, part time, at Fermilab from 2016 to 2018. As a user at Fermilab, she served as the founding spokesperson for the ArgoNeuT experiment and for the MicroBooNE experiment (later co-spokesperson). She has been a leading collaborator on SBND and DUNE and pioneered the detector technology employed for all these experiments, Liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers, which is also the technology employed by DUNE. Fleming currently holds a joint appointment with the University of Chicago in the Enrico Fermi Institute within the Department of Physics.
Fleming has received numerous honors and awards, including election to the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in 2024, the APS DPF Mentoring award in 2018, and an APS Fellowship in 2013. She served on the 2014 P5 HEPAP subpanel and more recently as co-chair for the DOE Basic Research Needs on Instrumentation panel and the HEPAP subpanel on International Benchmarking. She currently serves as a member of the National Academies Decadal Survey in particle physics and as a member of the Physics and Astronomy Research Council for the Heising Simons Foundation.
Combined with her research, leadership, and community participation, Fleming actively encourages women and girls to pursue science through several programs including through founding and running Girls Science Investigations (gsi.yale.edu) at Yale from 2007-2021.
Andrea M. Ghez, professor of Physics & Astronomy and Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine chair in Astrophysics, is one of the world’s leading experts in observational astrophysics and heads UCLA’s Galactic Center Group.
Best known for her ground-breaking work on the center of our Galaxy, which has led to the best evidence to date for the existence of supermassive black holes, she has received numerous honors and awards including the Nobel Prize in 2020, she became the fourth woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing one half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel(the other half of the prize being awarded to Roger Penrose). The Nobel Prize was awarded to Ghez and Genzel for their Independent discovery of a supermassive compact object, now generally recognized to be a black hole, in the Milky Way's galactic center, the Crafoord Prize in Astronomy from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science (she is the first woman to receive a Crafoord prize in any field), Bakerian Medal from the Royal Society of London, a MacArthur Fellowship, election to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Her work on the orbits of stars at the center of the Milky Way has opened a new approach to studying black holes and her group is currently focused on using this approach to understand the physics of gravity near a black hole and the role that black holes play in the formation and evolution of galaxies.
Advances in high-resolution imaging technology enabled Ghez’s work and her group continues to work on pushing the frontiers of these technologies forward. She serves on several leadership committees for the W. M. Keck Observatory, which hosts the largest telescopes in the world, and the future Thirty Meter Telescope.
Ghez is also very committed to the communication of science to the general public and inspiring young girls into science. Her work can be found in many public outlets including TED, NOVA’s Monster of the Milky Way, Discovery’s Swallowed by a Black Hole, TED, and Griffith Observatory.
Ghez earned her B.S. from MIT in 1987, and her PhD from Caltech in 1992 and has been on the faculty at UCLA since 1994.
For more information see http://www.galacticcenter.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~ghez
Anna Grassellino, Director of the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems (SQMS) Center.
Anna Grassellino directs the SQMS Center, a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center, a Fermilab Senior Scientist and the head of the Fermilab SQMS division. She holds an adjunct faculty appointment at Northwestern University, where is Co-Director of the Center for Applied Physics and Superconducting Technology (CAPST). Her research focuses on radio frequency superconductivity, in particular on understanding and improving SRF cavities performance to enable new applications spanning from particle accelerators to detectors to quantum information science. Grassellino is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and the recipient of numerous awards for her pioneering contributions to SRF technology, including the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award, the Frank Sacherer Prize of the European Physical Society, the IEEE PAST Award, the 2016 USPAS prize and a DOE Early Career Award. She holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s of electronic engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy.