Howard Haber

Howard Haber is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). After retiring from teaching in July, 2020, he was subsequently rehired at UCSC as a Research Professor of Physics. He continues to pursue an active program of theoretical research with a focus on new phenomena beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, with particular attention to the theory and phenomenology of extended Higgs sectors and the potential for new discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider and at future high energy collider facilities now under development.

Haber received a dual bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) followed by a master’s degree at MIT in 1973. In 1978, he completed his Ph.D. degree in physics at the University of Michigan, followed by three postdoctoral two-year positions at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was subsequently promoted at UCSC to a position of Adjunct Assistant Professor and in 1985 he was awarded an Outstanding Junior Investigator grant by the Department of Energy. His position was regularized at UCSC in 1989 as an Associate Professor with tenure, and one year later he was promoted to Full Professor. Since returning to California in the fall of 1982, he has also been a SLAC Affiliate scientist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), where he often spends one or two days each week with the SLAC Theory Group.

In 1995, Haber spent nine months at CERN as a Scientific Associate. Subsequently, he was a Frontier Fellow at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) for three months in fall of 1998 and a visiting Professor of Physics at the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology in Durham, UK for three months in the winter of 2003. During the 2013-2014 academic year, he worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) with the Particle Data Group and the Theoretical Physics Group as an LBNL Lab Affiliate. He has been a frequent visitor to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, where he has spent two separate sabbatical quarters in the winter of 1994 and in the spring of 2016. He also spent seven weeks at the Galileo Galilei Institute (GGI) for Theoretical Physics in Florence, Italy as a Simons GGI Visiting Scientist in the late summer and early fall of 2018.

In 1993, Haber was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. He won an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2009, which provided support for travel to the University of Bonn in Germany for twelve months. In addition to spending four months in Bonn in the late summer and fall of 2010, he has returned to Bonn frequently for shorter visits. In 2017 he was a co-recipient of the American Physical Society J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, “for instrumental contributions to the theory of the properties, reactions, and signatures of the Higgs boson.”

Haber was elected as a General Member of the Aspen Center for Physics for four successive terms from 1993-2013. During that time, he also served as a Trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics from 2005-2011. He was the Assistant Scientific Secretary in 1995-1996, the Scientific Secretary in 1996-1997 and the Corporate Secretary from 1998-2001. He also served as the Chairs of the Nominations Committee in 1999, the Public Lecture Series Committee in 2003, the Program Committee in 2004, and the Aspen Center for Physics Presidential Search Committee in 2016. In 2013, Haber was elected as an Honorary Member of the Aspen Center for Physics for a five year term, which was subsequently renewed for a second five year term in 2018. Other service to the field of particle physics include a two year elected term as a Member of the Executive Committee of the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) of the American Physical Society from 2002-2004 and a three year elected term as Secretary/Treasurer of the DPF from 2013-2015.

As of December, 2022, Haber is an author of 131 scientific papers that have been published in peer-reviewed professional journals. As an outside consultant since 1992 and later a full member of the Particle Data Group since 2007, he is an author of the Supersymmetry Theory review article that is published in the “Review of Particle Physics” and is updated every two years. He is a co-author of “The Higgs Hunter’s Guide”, which was published in 1990 (and subsequently released as a paperback book in 2000). Haber, in collaboration with Herbi Dreiner and Stephen Martin, has recently finished writing a textbook on two-component spinor techniques and supersymmetry with further applications to theories of physics beyond the Standard Model entitled “From Spinors to Supersymmetry,” published by Cambridge University Press in June 2023.