Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics and Director, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California at Santa Barbara
Nobel Laureate, Physics
David Gross is the Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics and the director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has made crucial contributions to particle physics and to string theory.
Atomic nuclei consist of particles called protons and neutrons. These, in turns, consist of elementary particles called quarks, which are held together by something called the strong nuclear force. This force has peculiar properties: You cannot isolate a quark - as you try to pull it away from its fellows, resistance gets ever stronger. Yet quarks that are close together behave almost as if there were no force between them at all. David Gross's contribution to understanding this latter phenomenon, which is known as asymptotic freedom, earned him the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Born in 1941, Gross received his doctorate in physics in 1966 at the University of California at Berkeley. After being a junior fellow at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a professor of physics at Princeton University in New Jersey, Gross went to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1997. He has received numerous honors, including a 1987 MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellowship and the 1988 Dirac Medal.
